“In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.”
– Thomas Cahill – “How the Irish Saved Civilization”
Tomorrow is Saint Patrick’s Day, a day to celebrate all things Irish. Across America, people will be wearing lots of Kelly green, sporting badges with the words “Kiss me, I’m Irish inscribed on them, tipping a pint of Guinness (the Irish also call it a pint o’ the bitters), or viewing parades with their friends and neighbors.
I’m Irish American myself, so I love the tradition. My father was the stereotypical Irish American. My mother, who was born in Newfoundland, met him when she came to Boston with her sisters in the 1930’s. She was smitten with his handsome face and curly hair not long after she met him. They got married and settled into life in America. He worked as a “chipper,” or the trade was more commonly known, ice man. He delivered blocks of ice to people’s homes every working day. It was backbreaking labor. My brother was born in 1938; my siter was born in 1940. I was born in 1942, about a year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
I have very few memories of him. I do remember running up to him occasionally when he came home from work. I’d jump up in his arms and he’d hug me. I remember the warmth of those hugs on my cheeks, along with the wetness on my arms and chest that came from the leather apron he wore. I have only one other memory of him. It came a few days before he died in 1948 from Tuberculosis. My mother, brother, sister, and I were standing in a hospital lobby looking up at the glass enclosed isolation ward where was standing. I can still visualize him waving meekly at us as we stared longingly at him from below. Any memory I now have of him comes from sources that were closer to him than I was.
I was born in 1942; the Pearl Harbor attack had taken place in December of 1941. For my father, the attack on Pearl Harbor brought out his patriotic instincts. He decided to join the Marine Corps and do his part as a loyal American. He took the physical and that’s when fate intervened. When the results came back the doctors notified him, “Mr. Dillon, you’ve got Tuberculosis.” He was despondent. He really wanted to join the Marine Corps. The doctors tried to reassure him. “It’s going to be a long war, Mister Dillon. Get treated and you’ll still have your chance to fight the Japanese.” He didn’t listen. He refused to get treated and sank into an alcohol fueled depression that eventually killed him.
I’ve never understood why he took the course he did. About the only thing about what did that’s made sense to me was that it was a very Irish approach, full of self-pity. He was maudlin to his core.
My mother was the brave one. She somehow fought her way through a nervous breakdown that included barbaric electroshock treatments to keep her family intact. It the kind of courage that one rarely finds in this world.
In the years since, when I’ve tried to recapture my early moments with my father, my wife, Nancy, has always reminded me that I needed to firmly grasp that it was my mother who should be my role model. She was the one who had the courage to keep going when things seemed impossible. My father had the maudlin Irish instincts. My mother was the one who was imbued with Celtic tenacity.
As I was growing up, I occasionally asked my mother about my Celtic roots. “How Irish am I?” She’d always respond, “You’re as Irish as Paddy’s pig.” I didn’t understand what the title meant. I just knew that I was “as Irish ad Paddy’s pig.” It wasn’t till years later that came to understand that it as the British who first coined the derisive term as a way of mocking the Irish as nothing more than crude, primitive, uneducated, dirty barbarians.
Strangely, the taunting language and description of the Irish that the British first used as an epithet has become a term I now warmly embrace. I am “AS IRISH AS PADDY’S PIG!”
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to visit Ireland several times. I’ve kissed the Blarney Stone. Nancy and I have had the pleasure of casually sipping tea at Bewley’s on Grafton Street. The tea was good, but what made the event so meaningful for us was the Irish approach to Bewley’s. Here in America, we sit at our table and other guests sit at theirs. It’s very private. Not so in Ireland. We sat down at a table and before we could get settled, we heard a man’s voice. “Do you mind if I sit with you, then?” We responded that we’d be delighted to have him join us. He then sat down with us and a brief conversation followed. He explained how things work in Ireland and then told us to keep our eyes on the lookout for the “do gooders” who are trying to ruin everything here in Ireland.”
You may be asking what a “do gooder” is. It’s an Irish slang for a liberal or a Progresssive.There weren’t many of them in Ireland in those days, but I think that has changed a lot in the years since. I do know that quite a few of them came to America, became politicians, and they are doing their very best to ruin things here now.
We’ve done a Dublin pub crawl, visiting the haunts of famous Irish writers like William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce. We’ve had the pleasure of sitting in a pub close to the Cliffs of Moher, listening to a uniquely Irish group perform traditional Irish ballads. When I say uniquely Irish that’s exactly what I mean. The two person group consisted of a young woman who played the flute. The thing that made her uniquely Irish was the fact that she chain- smoked while she played. I can still see the smoke floating from the flute as she played. The guitarist was a one-legged man, whose skill with the guitar and his warm Irish tenor voice were incomparable. There was the third member of the ensemble, but he didn’t perform with a musical instrument. He was an elderly gentleman who sat on a stool next to the perfumers. He sat smiling, with his mouth closed, so I couldn’t tell for sure whether he had many teeth in his head. He just sat there, smiling, with his right hand extended in the direction of the audience. That extended right hand was a signal to the bartender to put of pint of Guinness in it at the appropriate time(s). It took me a minute or two to figure out what his role was until it hit me. He was a “groupie,” an Irish version of the “groupies” who follow rock bands and singers from venue to venue here in America.
It was a memorable evening, made even more memorable as Nancy and I made our way back to Maeve Fitzgerald’s Inn, accompanied in the moonlit night by a couple of cows enjoying a stroll with us.
We’ve done an amazing tour of the library at Dublin’s Trinity College. It’s home to the famous Book of Kells, a beautifully crafted manuscript of the four gospels based on the Latin (Vulgate) of the Christian Bible. The original texts were composed sometime in the fourth century by Saint Jerome. That, along with the thousands of classical texts, were preserved by the Irish monks of Iona like Columba, Aidan, and Scabbyhead when the barbarians swept across much of Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries, about 200 years after Saint Jerome died.
Their work was critical to the preservation of Christian civilization. Their contributions have been memorialized in contemporary literature. One of those works is Thomas Cahill’s “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” I read it a few years ago and recommend it highly. Also, for those who may be wondering how the Irish came to America I’d also like to recommend Edward Laxton’s “The Famine Ships” which chronicles the Irish pilgrimage from the great potato famine to the anti British uprisings of the early twentieth century.
Nancy and I have seen just about anything a person would want to see in Ireland over the years.
We once got to meet a wonderful group of young Irishmen in a pub who were celebrating a rare curling or rugby victory over the British. They fell in love with us, in part because we’re Americans and in part because they loved saying two words – Nancy and Kansas, which they pronounced “Nhhhancee” and “Khhhansas.” They would celebrate, then stop and say, “Boys, let’s go give Nhhhancee from Khhhansas a hug.”
It was priceless.
On another trip, we somehow managed to crash the boat we’d rented into an arched bridge. Thankfully, by that time I’d kissed the Blarney Stone, which made explaining the disaster to the owner quite pleasant. I called him and said, “well, then, you wouldn’t believe it. We’ve sheared off a wee bit of the cabin of your boat.”
As the Irish almost always do, he took it all in stride.
On another trip, we had the pleasure of meeting an older woman who had to be the sauciest waitress I’ve ever met. She was in her sixties, I think. She was about five feet tall. She weighed less than a hundred pounds, but, oh man, did she have a wicked left hook. I can still hear her fist against the mouth of an unruly patron she confronted on the other side of the establishment. I can still hear the thud of his body hitting the floor. When I asked her what had happened, she said nonchalantly, “I just popped ‘im one and that was that.”
Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating Saint Patrick’s life and contributions to Western Civilization. He came to Ireland, not as a native Irishman, but as a slave. By the time he’d shed those chains, he was responsible for abolishing slavery and bringing Christianity to large swaths of Ireland. Folklore even maintains that he singlehandedly drove the snakes out of Ireland. If that’s true, I suspect that more than a few of them made their way to America with the “do gooders” of Dublin and became politicians.
I’ve gone about as far as my Irish “gift of gab” can take me today. Tomorrow I’m going to enjoy celebrating the fact that I’m as “Irish as Paddy’s Pig.” I’ll be eating the traditional corned beef dinner, along with Irish soda bread, and possibly a pint of Guinness. My Saint Patrick’s wish for you is the same – good food, Irish soda bread, a pint of Guinness, and lots of happy conversations and enjoy one another’s company.