How Irish am I?
It's a good question around St. Patrick's Day, when everyone is Irish. I'm certainly as Irish as he who drove the snakes from Ireland and used the shamrock to illustrate the Holy Trinity; though that English-born saint does enjoy a certain celebrity that I've yet to attain.
How Irish am I?
My forebears, my family says, were memorialized in inscriptions in Latin or Gaelic over many a church lintel; my father didn't speak English until he was six years old, so isolated were his childhood circumstances; my mother bears that most venerated of all Irish women's names, Mary Alice; her four brothers, all save the one who died in the inevitable accidental Irish drowning, were ordained Catholic priests. So how Irish am I?
Well, my mother's name is Hogan, and her brother did drown, very tragically, in Lake Michigan in 1939; my uncles were all Catholic priests -- a peculiarly Irish form of birth control in which the male takes responsibility for contraception (it works most of the time); an Irish great-uncle was fond of telling my father that he recalled the legend, "God spare us the wrath of the fierce Norsemen" -- my father's antecedents -- inscribed over Irish church doorways; and my father, alas, had the old tongue -- Norwegian -- until he was six and his family moved from northwestern Minnesota to Chicago, where he and my mother grew up, and where I was born: white Irish Norwegian Catholic. Thoroughly American.
|
|