And today was St. Patrick's Day. I celebrated by making a point of listening to the Cranberries.

Nothing like St. Patrick's Day in New York City to make me feel like an anthropologist trying to understand some inscrutable farflung tribe. I can't understand it at all. Years ago, I worked at 47th and Madison, which is pretty much deep in the thick of the festivities. Well I remember wandering out for lunch unsuspecting the first March 17th I was working there. Outside the serene lobby, bedlam reigned. Drunken hordes filled the streets. And the sidewalks were slick with spilled green beer and vomit. It was horrifying.

I'm glad I'm not anything. My people are from the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania. My heritage--moving from East to West--is Russian, Polish, German, Dutch, French, English and Welsh. Basically everyone who was down in the mines in the middle of the Nineteenth Century has ended up making a contribution. So the story goes, my Polish great grandfather, who came to this country as a young boy, was standing on the docks in Bayonne, New Jersey. A man came up to him and asked, "Polska?" "Da! Ya Polska!" replied my great grandfather. The man asked him if he had a job. My great grandfather said that he didn't, but was anxious to find one. Before the sun set, he was down in the mines.

Nothing tends to predominate in me. I can see 'national traits' of everything and nothing. Sort of like reading descriptions of horoscopes not your own. "Yeah, that pretty much describes me." French sang-froid, Welsh pig-headedness, English stiff upper lip, Dutch loopiness, German coldness, Polish joie de vivre, Russian moodiness. It's in there.

My second mother (my father was widowed twice) was Scots. She had been in this country for about a year when she met and subsequently married my father. This was during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. On St. Patrick's Day, I went off to elementary school in an orange sweater. I remember once my step mother, my father and I were in the car driving through Philadelphia. We were stopped at a light and there was a policeman directing traffic. He was probably Irish-American. There had recently been an I.R.A. bombing. My mother rolls down the window and screams at the cop, "Bloody Irish Bastard! Murderer! Coward! Killing innocent women and children! Murderer!"

I came to associate 'being' Scots with hating the Irish. And the English. And probably the Welsh, although they didn't come up much in conversation. 'Being' something meant that there was someone you hated. I was glad that 'being' nothing in particular, I didn't have to hate.

When I was in college, I took a course in Irish Poetry and Prose. The first four weeks of the course were devoted to Irish history and culture. Wow. It was amazing. And the stuff I read in that class was some of the best and most memorable from all of my college career. When I visited Ireland on vacation, I was enchanted and awed. I felt that having grown up under the influence of my Scots mother (who was a wonderful person in many respects), I had narrowly escaped a terrible fate.

Why is it that on St. Patrick's Day the Irish don't gather and read Yeats or Galway Kinnell or James Joyce? Or tell the story of brave school teacher Padraic Pearse in the Post Office on Easter, 1916? Or screen Michael Collins? I mean, green beer? If that's not an English plot to defame Irish heritage, what else could it be? It's as if Jews gathered on Israel Day to read aloud from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and went running through the streets with sharpened knives looking for Christian babies. Or the French on Bastille Day wearing berets, carrying baguettes, and surrendering to any people of German descent they might run into.

Well. Or Gay men celebrating pride day by cavorting to disco, scantily clad, on Fifth Avenue, and flipping a bird to St. Patrick's Cathedral. Hmmmm. I guess all of us deserve to invite our demons out to dance once in a while. So I'll take it all back. Read Cuchulain another time. Raise a pint of green Guiness and sing Galway Bay till the cows come home.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

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