Every year when I was growing up, my father gave my sisters and me green carnations on St. Patrick’s Day. I remember they were always waiting there, ready to be pinned to our plaid uniforms, before we even got dressed for school. He must have woken up in the wee hours of those March mornings to get to the florist and buy the artificially dyed flowers that I now consider as much a part of my holiday celebrations as beer and a parade.
It wasn’t even his holiday. A Hungarian Jew, though not religious, he stuck out in our big Irish Catholic family; and yet, on this most Irish of holidays, it is his contribution to the celebration I remember most. He died when I was in high school—I was wearing a green plaid skirt when I learned he’d been taken to the hospital, and my blue-and-green school kilt on the day he passed away. That was in November, far from March’s hope of spring.
On that year’s St. Patrick’s Day, the flowers were there again. Mom, this time, continuing the tradition. Each year since then, my “wearing o’ the green” is more than just a testament to my Irish heritage. It’s a remembrance of my father.
My favorite picture of my dad is an old one of him in suit and tie, overcoat, and fedora, standing along Fifth Avenue watching a parade. It may or may not have been the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but I choose to believe it was. The parade route always passed in front of his office building; and to this day, that is the place I choose for viewing the marching drum and fife bands, the Police Societies, the tightly curled young Irish dancers prancing up the avenue in delicately embroidered dresses, and the politicized banners from the various counties of the Republic and the North. I wear a green shirt, or an Aran sweater, and I pin a green carnation to my lapel, or twirl it in my hair.
PREVIOUS PAGE
