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Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Posted March 17, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

Ever since I was adopted by Ed and Alice Young in 1958, I’ve loved St. Patrick’s Day. They gave me my name, Patrick Joseph Young, named after the patron saint of Ireland and the grandfather, Joe Brady, who cared for his daughter Alice by himself after his wife took sick and died.

St. Patrick and St. Joseph, saints whose feast days are back to back. San Guisseppe zeppoles soothed my tummy the morning after a St. Patrick’s feast many times in my youth.

At St. Brigid’s School, where the nuns taught me how to read and add, St. Patrick’s day was the longed-for break from routine when we were allowed to spend our pennies on the school’s own feast.

At the entrance to St. Brigid’s Church on Post Avenue, the statues of St. Pat and St. Brigid, the patroness of Ireland, stand next to one another, looking like they are about to go out on a chaste date.

Mom always made a dinner for us of corned beef and cabbage on the great day. And she prayed in those years that March 17 fell on a Lenten Friday that the bishop would grant a dispensation allowing us to gorge on corned beef, ‘cause bishops can do that.

When I was 19, I started throwing St. Patrick’s Day parties myself and I’ve thrown them every year since. This will be the thirty-third.

When my own wife was dying from a brain tumor a few years ago, I asked her if she wanted to cancel the annual party. She told me she had been looking forward to it for weeks and couldn’t see mere mortality getting between us and good St. Pat.

In the weeks before she died, when friends would arrive to see her she would tell them I was in the kitchen making corned beef and cabbage. As her memory faded, she had come to believe that every day was St. Patrick’s Day.



Image by Mike McCune via Flickr.

Tags : irish, irish immigrants

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