I love Saint Patrick's Day--except for the pinching bullshit. One of the little mysteries that confound me every St. Patrick's Day is the origins of of the annoying custom of pinching someone who isn't wearing green. The one thing I know is that it didn't originate among the Irish-American community in any major Northeast city. I know because I grew up in Stamford, Conn., and have friends from Boston, Philly, Baltimore, New York and they never heard of this either. It didn't happen in my Miami. FL Catholic schools, either. It isn't Irish-American, that much I can tell you--and the people who told me about it weren't Irish-American either.
This day always makes me think of my family. I am 3/4 Irish (Connelly, Conway, O'Leary, Costigan, Fitzgerald that I know of) and 1/4 Russian Jewish. I was an only child, as was my Mother and maternal grandfather--but my maternal grandmother was one of 9 sisters, and we all hung out together, so we felt like part of a muchlarger family. Weddings, funerals, holidays, and just visiting was always fun.
My paternal family was problematic. My grandfather and his brothers (except for my godfather) were short, belligerent Irish drunks. My father used to say his father, who was about 5'4", grew an inch with every drink he took, and never backed down from anyone. Not a nice man. He was, I think, the source of Dad's own issues: an inability to admit he was wrong or to apologize and to express emotions easily.
Until I was 5, I lived in a house with 4 generations under one roof. My great-grandmother Connelly lived with us. She was in her 80s by then, and walked with a cane, the aftereffect of a stroke, but she read to me every day. It's her fault that, after one too many shots of the Irish, I develop a brogue. Her brogue, from Galway. It happens when I am around native-born Irish too, and the two weeks I spent in Ireland were interesting for that reason--and in London, people asked me if I was Irish. I think the red hair had something to do with it.
Brigid Mary Conway Connelly was a sweet old lady when I knew her, but in her day, she was an Irish matron with a fist of iron. She had to be. She came from Ireland with a young husband at the turn of the century. Her husband died early one and she had two boys to raise, only of whom lived past 5. They'd owned a restaurant, and before she died, they owned three in the Stamford and Greenwich area. During Prohibition, they were also speakeasies, but they never had any problems with the law because the local chiefs of police and half the force, plus the mayors and city councilmen, came there to drink and eat. She was a Republican and my grandfather a Democrat not because she liked Republicans so much, but because having a foot in each party gave her some clout in the local scene!
This fierce woman ran my grandfather Francis's life. He wanted to study chemistry at the University of Hawaii--the farthest he could get from her and still be in America. She refused to help him pay for it and sent him to a local school. He ran away to the merchant marine in between, but she hauled him back because he was under age. She didn't approve of the woman he fell in love with, probably because the O'Learys, while warm and loving, weren't well off. Brigid was strictly "lace curtain Irish"--which is NOT a compliment but refers to an Irish Catholic who wanted to fit in with the affluent Protestants, the only one who could afford lace curtains which were stitched in convents by local Irish Catholic women).
The O'Learys came from Carlow, one from the town and one from a farm. Great-grandfather John was sweet and gentle man who adored his wife and worked as a groundskeeper on a large estate in Greenwich. He and his wife raised 9 daughters. I was told I looked like the eldest (and the one photo my grandmother had of her confirms it) with her thick auburn hair and blue eye (she lost the other to an infection as a young girl). Actually Lizzie's granddaughter looks so much like me that we could be twins, except that she's 6 inches taller than me--and she also bellydanced.
They were never well-off, always working class, but they always had room to take in a new immigrant from Ireland. One of their boarders became the doctor who took care of Mary Helen, my great-grandmother, in her old age. He told them to call them if she needed him no matter how late, because he owed her his medical degree and his life in America. John and Helen O'Leary inspired that kind of devotion int heir children and those who knew them.
The family has a place in local folklore, too. My grandparents always went to early Mass, but the older girls preferred sleeping in, so they'd take the cart and horse to church. One Sunday, on the way home, the ancient horse keeled over and dropped dead int he road. Lizzie had to send for help. Many decades later, one of my cousins was doing a research project for history on local folklore, and ran across the Legend of the Ghost Horse of Greenwich. She asked her Mom if it could be the horse who dropped dead after Mass--and, when we looked at the stretch of road where the Ghost Horse was supposed to appear, it was the same place. Lizzie's horse has passed into local ghost stories. We have our very own ghost horse.
My grandmother, Anna Marie, was a sweet and pretty woman who dropped out of school after the eight grade to go to work. She worked as a maid at a local boarding school, Rosemary Hall (years later, I shared a room at a prom weekend with three girls from that school) and alter worked in a factory sewing sheets and clothing. She wasn't up to Brigid's standards. She and several of her sisters were "Black Irish" with very dark hair and eyes, acquiline noses and skin which tanned a rich brown; they looked more Italian than Irish. My grandfather adored her, and their love (and perhaps an on-purpose pregnancy which produced my mother 7 months after the wedding)prevailed. Brigid mellowed as soon as her only grandchild was born.
My grandparents lived with us my entire life until their deaths in 71 (grandfather) and 84 (grandmother). They were more like parents than my actual parents because Mom worked and Dad was always distant. They picked me up at school and kepotme amused as a small child.
The Irish storytelling tradition was alive and well in our family. I had four gifted seannachies to entertain me. I was soothed to sleep with tales of my grandmother's girlhood (hence my knowledge of the ghost Horse, along with a lot of other wild tales)--of Hiberbnian Society dances, of the exploits of Lizzie and the sisters, of the time my patient and always kind Great-grandfather told off his sister who didn't think a woman with 9 children should go to the Altar and Rosary Society convention in New York City ("Katherine, if you spent more time minding your own business instead of everybody else's, maybe your husband Toby wouldn't be drinking so much of the profits of the pub he owns"). They were poor, but the stories she told amde them sound like the Waltons with an Irish brogue--and she never felt poor growing up. My grandfather specialized in tales about Dopey Dimdock, the leprechaun who lived int he large woods behind our tiny subdivision in Darien. I learned years later that part of that land was owned by retired dwarf who'd been a clown with Ringling Brothers. He was a bit of a curmudgeon and didn't have much to do with people if he could help it--so there really was a leprechaun, minus, the pot of gold, in our woods. Dad amused me with renditions of classic horror movies and Sherlock Holmes stories, while Mom regaled me with synopses of musicals like Brigadoon and Finian's Rainbow.
And music...Dad had a magnificent baritone voice, and he'd sing the old stage Irish songs like " Turra lurra Lurra" and "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" and all of George M./ Cohan. Later, I herd the Clancy Brothers, and my love of Irish folk music was born. From there I progressed to Irish lore and history and literature. I remember writing a paper on Yeats' Cuchulain plays and being told it was a magnificent paper and that I had, intentionally or not, written it in Kiltartanese, the dialect Lady Gregory used when she wrote her collections of lore. I had never read Lady Gregory, but the language felt right to me--like channeling Brigid for my childhood.
I know some Irish Catholic families of the time were harsh and unforgiving, but mine practiced a gentler form of the religion. My father's godchild married in the Episcopalian church. When Dad asked the priest back in 62, if he could attend the wedding, the priest told him, "Of course. He's family. Be there for him." We had one family member who divorced and remarried and no one said a word. Another did a stint in jail but straightened his life out. One cousin married a man who worked for the Mob--well, technically, he collected gambling debts for the big casinos in Vegas--and he was accepted. Cousins stopped going to church and no one said anything.
The closest my family came to being harsh was the time my late cousin Sheila decided to postpone laundry day to take the kid to story hour at the library. Her mother said she'd do the laundry, or maybe Sheila should stay home and do it.
Sheila told her the laundry could wait. but story time couldn't.
Her mother then tried Irish Catholic Guilt. "But what if there's a fire and the fireman come to put it out and see all that dirty laundry? WHat will they think?" Aunt Maggie was channeling her aunt Katherine, the one her father told to mind her own business.
My cousin looked at her and with perfect timing, replied, "I'd hope they'd be too damned busy putting out the fire to care about my dirty laundry."
I long ago outgrew Irish Catholic Guilt, and the Catholic part, too. But the lilt of Irish laughter still rings in my heart whenever I think of weddings and get-togethers with the O'Leary clan. And tonight I'll raise a glass to them, who were all in heaven an hour before the divil knew they were dead. My Irish eyes, blue as my mother's, will be smiling tonight, even if there's a few tears in them.