Ask any Irish person a question and you will never get a straight answer. Is it raining out? Well yes and no. To be fair, rain is ubiquitous in Ireland, to the point that you’d forget what not raining actually looked like. But you get the point.
St. Patrick’s Day is less than two weeks away and already I’m seeing the signs. Giant green plastic sunglasses, outsized leprechauns, strings of shiny foil shamrocks, and other symbols of my national day that I never laid eyes upon until I came to America.
As the day approaches, I always feel a weird mix of Irish pride, disgust for the shiny leprechauns, and confusion. After all, I left Ireland when I was 22. Yet every year on March 17th I am expected to wear green, pinch people who do not, and, as the token Irish person in the room, know everything there is to know about my tiny island and its ten thousand years of human history.
As an emigrant who has lived longer in her new home than her native land, I’m no expert on Ireland. But I can tell you this: we are a nation that has been kicked in the head for centuries and the way we deal with our cumulative trauma is by laughing at it. Black humor, trademark of the Irish. Nation of saints and scholars, alcoholics and child-abusing priests, and the most generous people on earth. Irish people would give you the shirt off their backs if you were in need, and at the same time they’ll cut you no slack if you’re being any kind of fool.
So here comes St. Patrick’s day, and I’m now living in upstate New York, a place with many more Irish emigrants than the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for the last 30 years. Apparently 12.9% of the residents of New York City claim Irish ancestry. And that was on Google so it must be true.
The other day, I caught myself wondering what silly green Irish thing I could wear for my zoom team meeting on St. Patrick’s Day. I actually found myself lurking by a pair of green plastic light-up glasses in William’s Hardware. Sara! Get a grip! The next day, I spotted another pair of plastic glasses in Tops Market. These ones had beer glasses for lenses. Ingenious, no? No!
It is also my birthday around this time of year. In fact, this is my birthday weekend. This means two things: one, I get to eat most of a packet of Marich’s Milk Chocolate Sea Salt Almonds for breakfast and two, I get cards in the mail that say things like: Everyone gets to be young once. Your turn’s over.
I have never really cared what advanced age I have reached. When you are 29, you think 30 is advanced. Note to all 30 year olds: bwaaa haaa haaa. When I turned 50 I didn’t really care because it just seemed ridiculous. How could I have been on the planet half a century and still not know how electricity works? Or fire? Or saving for retirement?
Moving right along, I am now turning 54 and it’s still pretty silly, the whole age thing. But I do love birthdays. I just picked up two more cards in the mail. One features a favorite quote of mine by Mae West: I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. I’m sure the person who sent it wasn’t thinking of me specifically. The other is a Covid card. I owe you one proper birthday, it says, there will be cake, booze, balloons, party hats and dancing, with hugs thrown in. It is a whole year since my first Covid birthday. That was the last time we had a dinner party. There are now Covid t-shirts, Covid mugs, and I haven’t checked but you can probably get underpants sprinkled with little spiky viruses. In Ireland, they are busy laughing at really tasteless Covid jokes. And man, there’s material.
This is my first snow birthday. For 53 birthdays, I have managed to avoid living in a place with real Winters, but I finally tripped up and moved to one. The great thing about a place with real Winter is that the seasons are very starkly delineated. And there are many more than four of them. A friend who lives in Montana posted on facebook a list of the Montana seasons. They include I Can’t Feel My Face, Fake Spring, and Is That Snow? There was a little red arrow pointing to Fake Spring with the words You Are Here.
We in the mid Hudson region are also, it appears, in fake Spring. During the past week, temperatures climbed above zero for the first time in a while and the snow began to melt. First it turned into giant ice fields, but then it began to succumb to the above-freezingness of the air and the bitter sun. We all ran about the place banging on about how Spring is in the air. Almost here. Just around the corner. One day it was 50 degrees. I took off my coat in the car and even opened the window to feel the fresh Spring breeze on my face.
The next day it was freezing cold. Not only that, but it was also windy. And muddy. With ice fields. And that, my friends, is how you know you have been duped by Fake Spring.
But next week the temperature is going to climb to 60 degrees for four straight days. There are buds on the trees, and birds flitting about. There are strange unidentified bugs in the barn. Fake Spring bugs! I don’t care if they are fake. I don’t care if the wind is whipping at the screen door and making me wish I had not thrown my heavy coat into the back of the closet like that. It’s my birthday weekend, St. Patrick’s Day is around the corner and Tops Market has these really cool beer glass spectacles. Because really, in the end, we’re all Irish.
