The old St. Patrick's Day quip about there being two kinds of people – those who are Irish and those who wish they were – turns out to be not so far from wrong. The research my colleague Michael Hout has carried out shows that there are a lot more Americans claiming to be Irish than one might expect from immigration records, because the children of ethnically mixed marriages … [Read more...] about The Irish as Playful Souls
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A Gift of Time
Three generations return home. ℘℘℘ A summer journey fills the pockets with scraps of nothing and bits of everything. The boarding coupon for seat 33F. A receipt for two crunchie bars, a ticket from that play in Galway, a few 20-pence pieces, a flat lake stone for skimming. And that slip of paper, scrawled with the name Dad mentioned as we traveled through Ireland in … [Read more...] about A Gift of Time
In Pursuit of my
Ancestral Heritage
From The Seven Little Foys to Patriot Games.
Once when I was a child, I asked my mother to let me dye my entire body green for St. Patrick's Day. She refused, sensibly enough, or I would still be trying to scrub the food coloring from my fingernails. That memory tells me I must have had a strong enough desire to proclaim my Irish roots from an early age.
But those were … [Read more...] about In Pursuit of my
Ancestral Heritage
My Wild Irish Mother
In 1967 when she was 80, I tossed a birthday party for Mother. There were over 70 people present: my generation and hers, friends and cousins, our children, cronies from way-back years. The party started at three in the afternoon because I was sure that Mother and the other old girls would get tired early. I should have known better. Twelve hours later, I and my contemporaries … [Read more...] about My Wild Irish Mother
Founding Father
A shy priest from Cavan who helped tame a frontier town. Imagine him, pale Irish skin against a black robe. On that bright spring morning in 1845 when he first arrived in the little town that was fast-filling a mud shelf overlooking the Missouri River, the Indians – the Shawnee in their calico flocks and turbans, the Sac and Fox with their shaved heads and painted faces – … [Read more...] about Founding Father