Saint Patrick's Day Memories

I've written before about how my relatives were Irish and expressed my late-blooming appreciation of St. Patrick.  Although my father never played the Irish card here in Chicago, he was indeed an Irish cop.  His brothers would sometimes sing Irish songs at celebrations and in taverns after a few drinks.  Their off-key and essentially horrible versions of  the usual songs that Irish Americans often sing, were so bad I had little interest in anything Irish.

My dad side also had a name, Norris,  that sounded more English than Irish so the Sisters never gave me any credit for being Irish.  I suppose I also had the odd look of the north as described in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. 

My dad had a very Irish look and as a young man would have fit in very nicely in anything John Ford might have filmed in Ireland.  Still, looks aren't everything and he often said, half jokingly,  that if he had his mother's last name, Callaghan, he would have gone a lot further in the police. 

I was probably in my 30s when my interest in being Irish hit.  My mother's side had come through Scotland--her parents had settled around Glasgow for jobs, but they died while she was young--her mother at her birth and her father about six years later.  She came over here with two of her sisters when she was about 10 years old and ended up being raised by an older brother.  Her brother and siblings seemed to be very smart and ambitious although I think her dad drank himself to death suffering deeply from the loss of his wife along with a bad case of tuberculosis that he contracted while in the service.  My mother's father's people were "Divers"  from north around Donegal and her mother was a "Lynch" from around Dublin. 

I am not exactly sure where my grandfather on my father's side came from.  We are pretty sure the Norris side came from Ireland although the name is more common in England.  There was a Lord Norris, a General I believe, who went into Ireland several hundred years ago, probably to put my other relatives in their place.  He stayed and likely had lots of children.  Whether one of them was a relative of mine, who knows! My grandmother Callaghan was born in Ireland, but spent some time in England doing a bit of housework before she came here.  The other names from both my paternal grandmother's side and my paternal grandfather's side are Irish.  While my grandfather's relatives were go-getters, my grandmother is remembered as a kind simple woman who had a number of  Irish friends here in Chicago. She and a cousin's grandmother were sometimes involved in conspiracies to see that others in the family married good Irish boys and girls so I can't see her marrying Grandpa Norris unless he had strong Irish roots.  I do believe he did have some Protestant roots and much of his family stopped communicating with him after he married my Catholic grandmother.  Like all converts, he was a very good Catholic who didn't swear or drink.  His sons on the other hand....

Anyway, St. Patrick came to me late in life after time had stripped his legacy of all those bad Irish singers, drunken parties and the like.  I've had this kind of twisted sense of myself --one minute kind of straight-forward serious and slightly confident and the next minute insecure, poetic, and emotional.  When I read Saint Patrick's prayer I felt akin to him and his insecurity.  I thought his prayer was so beautiful asking to be surrounded on all sides by Christ--of course St. Patrick had good reason to be so fearful, I frankly did not.  But I was sold on his prayer---and then sold on him--and then sold on the idea of being Irish and understanding what it might mean.  What also helped was a young woman in our area who put together an Irish band and presented great Irish music that was beautiful and sober.  Danny Boy had been about as bad a song as I had ever heard, until she sang it and the light went on in my head. One of our daughters who has a very sweet voice has taken up a few Irish songs (although with a hundred non-Irish), and hearing her sing has brought more Irish joy to me.  So once I got past some of my awful childhood memories of being Irish, I was able to appreciate it as a part of me in an honest and meaningful way.  

I do think we live in an insecure world.  As a lot of folks move away from our religious connections  here in the states and in Ireland as I understand, the world gets a little scarier.  I am not a poster boy for the faith, but I do cling to it tightly and Saint Patrick's prayer has helped.  As a young boy, I could feel God's presence and I had a constant communication with him.  As I get older, I am trying to restore that connection as best I can.