As a child, I disliked St. Patrick’s Day. “Don’t be so contrary,” my father admonished me, perhaps forgetting that contrariness was part of the Irish compact. Even at an early age, I sensed a primordial sadness amid the green-tinted frivolity. During adolescence, when my stubborn non-observance transitioned to cultural pride, the melancholy lingered.
This ache would arise each March 17 on family rides to out-of-town festivities or to my grandmother’s house in Hazleton, where our Irish Catholic heritage had germinated. On those trips—typically bound north on Route 81, the Corrs or Cranberries or some rebel song playing in the background—my father gave an oral history lesson, often dating to our ancestors’ famine-era arrival in the anthracite coal region. By adulthood, I had logged enough car rides and feast days to realize these solemnities were part of being Irish.
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