Cabbage, potatoes, carrots – and hot dogs. Hey, they were at least pink. I couldn’t afford corned beef – I was in college, living off campus and scrounging for food.
That was a tragic Saint Patrick’s Day. I was cooking only for myself, lonely but spared at least from having to explain to anyone else how Oscar Meyer wieners fit into the whole Irish boiled dinner thing (they don’t; trust me).
Later, I put on my leprechaun face and went out with friends to celebrate. Hurrah for ten-cent drafts, in the Year of Our Lord 1980! In March, those drafts were all dyed green. We didn’t complain, even though our teeth took on an odd tinge. We could share a pitcher for a dollar, not caring whether the next day’s headache came from cheap beer or toxic coloring.
I haven’t had a hot dog or a green beer since.
My college friends – all bearing lovely lilting lyrical Irish names — were much closer to the Old Sod than I. One would never serve carrots with corned beef, since they were orange and fraught with Protestant flavor. Another refused to drink Bushmills, since that’s the whiskey of Northern Ireland. Another insisted, later, that I put an O’ in front of my married name. In retrospect, I wish I had.
I always fancied myself an Irish person. Imagine my chagrin at discovering that Husband – he of the multi-syllabic German name and vague Pennsylvania Dutch heritage – is actually more Irish than I.
We swabbed our cheeks for DNA testing – blame mid-winter boredom and general curiosity. Husband was out to challenge his family’s claim to Native American blood (that great-grandmother in the old grainy photo has dark hair and a prominent nose, after all). My motivation was vanity – I wanted to be Irish enough to wear a claddagh ring without feeling like a phony.
Turns out, the Deutch Cherokee I’m married to is actually Irish and Scandinavian. And this O’Brien lass is as English as she is Irish.
So maybe I can be excused for never getting through Finnegan’s Wake. Perhaps I can also be excused for the dark urge to go head hunting whenever I’m crossed. Turns out, I’m .08% Papua New Guinean.
Raise a Saint Patrick’s Day glass to diversity!
Don’t worry about it, the English who colonized the Emerald Isle considered themselves to have gone full native, even while burning down granges and Irish-speaking villages. It’s the same reason there’s such a huge distinction between highland and lowland Scots. Jonathan Swift was one of these merry Anglo-Irish, though not as problematic as some (say, Edmund Spenser). This sounds like a unhappy message, but it need not be.
If you want to augment your Celtic cred or atone for all that green beer this St. Paddy’s, I’d recommend you pick up Ciaran Carson’s amazing translation of the Táin Bó Cuáilnge (manuscript ca. 1215, printed by Penguin Books), a bone-crunching story of exactly why you never fuck with a half-divine psychopathic teenaged Irishman (w/ seven toes on each foot), especially one who goes into a warp spasm when enraged or who has a spear that opens like an umbrella inside your body. It’s a savage story, but with a weird, totally alien and fascinating gentility and sense of fair play. Even when CC massacres seven thousand Connacht warriors and their camp followers in a single day. Pagan as hell but read through the totally non-interventionist and non-judgmental Christianity of its copyists. The story itself is magical, and there exist strange legends about its dissemination and memory. You’ll love it — it’s a total hoot — and Carson is one of Ireland’s greatest modern poets.
[Added: I also once succumbed to the green beer and I was standing in the Dark horse on St. Paddy’s Day in the early 90s, cup full in my hand, talking to people. But what I didn’t notice was that my thumb had slipped into my drink. It was now bright green. So I poured it out, and bought a more expensive stout. Standards, I guess.]