A Lark

    "Up the Irish," cries this swimmer emerging from the frigid waters of the Atlantic on this St. Patrick's Day morning in Portland, Maine.  It looks to me like he is on fire and I can testify that a cold plunge really makes you feel alive, on fire with life.
    Tingling and embodied, life is a vivid experience.  I am living  a life aware of the needs of others, perhaps even before the need is given voice...one thing I've learned for certain in the past three years, since I lost my dad on St. Pat's 2006, is that I need to empower my mother with dignity.  I admire her courage to live alone, forge a life without a man she had known since childhood, but of course, she's Irish too...and full of courage.

 

Can one have a genetic memory?  I mean on a cellular level, am I Irish?  That's one of the questions Pete McCarthy poses in his plunge of a book, McCarthy's Bar.  I read it cover-to-cover, couldn't put it down, the cats went hungry and the beds unmade.  It's that good.  So I say to myself, I have to know more  about  this  funny  fellow. To google I  go.  And  I am too late.
     Pete McCarthy died five years ago at the age of 52.  To read more on this talented, loving man, click here.
    Some years ago I said to my patient husband that I was Scotch as well as Irish and maybe a little Viking thrown in. And he said it didn't matter that the Irish genes were the heavy weights; that I was Irish.  Growing up in neighborhood full of Kelly's and Kiely's and Kilkers, I'd hear lovely lilting voices commenting on the first generation kids..."Oi now, didn't she scalp the angels on the way down!"  Or, "Now doesn't he have the map of Oirland on his face?"  And the one that sent me running home in tears from Mrs. Hogan's kindergarten..."Why look at little Annie, she's as Irish as Paddy's Pig!"
    To be Irish is to be in on the secret:  The world's a wonder, full of mystery and magic.  Life embraces  you if you travel McCarthy's way, with more hope than itinerary.

    And yes, Mr. McCarthy, it does seem that these days everyone wants to be Irish.  A friend and poet, Juliet Clancy, and I were in a writer's group.  A new woman arrived an hour and half late, but in time to hear a tale from another new member, an Asian woman.  Speaking in her thickly accented English, she said she knew this incarnation was not correct, that she should have been born a Celt.  Juliet, raised in Dublin, lifted an eyebrow in my direction.  I was biting my lip to keep from laughing in the woman's earnest face.

    But then the woman newly arrived blurted that she had just returned from the West of  Ireland and intended to change her name.  "What?" I asked.  She said her first name was Connie and she was changing her last name to Mara, so she'd be  called Connemara.

    "Really?"  I queried.  "Oh, yes indeed," she replied as serious as the grave.

    Juliet and I exploded with laughter, rude, yes.  But unavoidably, Irish!

N    This is a picture of a young C.S. Lewis taken in 1919.  Handsome fellow and Irish.  He was born in Belfast and served in the British Regimentals, surviving World War One's hellish trench warfare.
When he was a little boy his dog, Jacksie, was killed by a passing car.  From that day foreword, Clive Staple Lewis demanded to be called Jacksie and would only answer to that name.  The family shortened it to Jack and he remained Jack to friends and family until his death in 1963 at the age of just 64.
    He wrote the seven fantasy novels that comprise The Chronicles of Narnia series between 1949 and 1954.  He vowed that they would never be made into live-action as that would be surely be nothing but buffoonery.  Of course the computer aided design available to filmmakers was unheard of in the 1950s, but still I think Lewis was right. 
    The experience of reading the Narnia series is to accept an invitation to explore the mythological.  The film, while gorgeous, is a two hour and forty minute pastiche. 
    For more on C.S. Lewis go to this link:   Further Up & Further In.
Pictured below is a statue of Prof. Digory Kirke with the famous wardrobe.  The bronze statue is where it should be, at the Holywood Arches, in front of the Holywood Road Library in East Belfast.  The open wardrobe is an invitation to explore the mythical world beyond.  Tell a child today:  "If you liked the movie, you'll love the book!"

  
	
A friend asked today, why wear green on
St. Patrick's Day?
And as we went round the roomful of 
mature, educated, but not Irish folk, I 
explained why we wear green today...
because we bloody well can! 

Following an execution of Irish patriots 
in the mid-19th century A.M. Sullivan wrote:

"Oh, Patrick, dear, and did you hear
    The news that's going round?
  The shamrock is by law forbid.
    To grow on Irish ground.
  No more St. Patrick's day we'll keep--
    His colour can't be seen,
  For there's a bloody law again
    The Wearing of the Green."

God bless all the Irish today!