This time of year…
…is when I wonder why I can’t just sit on my kitchen floor and eat corned beef for days straight.
(This time of year is when I spend days straight cooking corned beef.)
This time of year is when I unabashedly, unashamedly, and uncontrollably wear green. And glitter. Though the former is more holiday-specific while the latter is just “Thursday.”
(We make our own luck.)
I also binge-listen to Irish music. And we’re not talking “cool” Irish music like the Pogues (whom I also adore), but no. I mean the entirety of Enya’s The Celts. (On repeat.) The whole gosh-darned catalog of the Irish Rovers. Up to and including The Black Velvet Band and The Town That I Loved. (The second title being the one that makes me cry like I’ve broken an arm bone.)
This time of year is when I think of how my Dad would always play Irish folk songs for us as we ate the corned beef and cabbage that my (Armenian) mother would lovingly prepare, inspiring my (Irish) Dad to tell her that it was almost as good as his (Irish) Mama’s cooking.
(This time of year is when I laugh about how awful my Dad always says the majority of his mother’s cooking was, because my mother was- and is- a phenomenal cook.)
And I remember drinking green-tinted apple juice and hearing stories about various crazy family members in Cork, Kerry, and Galway. (And watching folks drink beer and tell even more stories about various shady family members in Cork, Kerry, and Galway.)
This time of year is when I really, really miss my Dad. My first St. Patrick’s Day without him. (My first everything year without him.)
So I drink to his memory and that of his father- Thomas Francis Flynn, Sr.- who, right before he died, made me promise to drink his favored Johnny Walker Black for him (and even though that’s not even Irish, you don’t argue with an elderly Irish man who has a gleam in his pale blue eyes), and to the memory of my Dad’s mother- Madeline Leola Callahan Flynn- who didn’t even drink all that much, but for whom my son’s middle name was given, so she gets a slug of whiskey, too.
This time of year is when I’m grateful that, even though the gene for the pale blue Flynn eyes passed me over, I somehow inherited Madzie’s tan (Callahan?) eye color.
This time of year is when I fondly remember my trip to Ireland– one of the best weekend trips of my life- to spend St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, driving an orange Fiat on the wrong side of the road, and getting face-painted by strangers on cobblestone streets. (Drive-by shamrocking, we called it.)
Old men in pubs asked me what my surname was, child. Young men in pubs asked if I had ever been to “Brooklyn.” (Both parties agreed that a Flynn from Boston- who’d been to New York, even– deserved a pint or two or seven on the house.)
This time of year is when I truly, honestly, love Ireland and think a return trip to the rolling countryside of legitimately shimmering green fields would be a spectacular idea.
And not just because of the pubs and the whole “drink for free” thing.
Not just because of that.
And this time of year is when I laugh- but not really all that much- at the fact that I legally swapped out Flynn, the only pronounceable portion of my name, because some charming, green-eyed, stranger (with German, Irish, Dutch, and Ecuadorian blood) made me laugh at an audition.
The Irish do love a good joke, after all.
(Happy St. Patrick’s Day, friends.)
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