St. Patrick’s Days Past

On The Day, I’d wake early at home in Brooklyn, having had a grand sleep, because I’d made myself stay in the night before with a book or the TV. To my mind, I was in training like fighters. Then, a light breakfast: there’d be Bloody Marys (Virgins for the Pledge-Takers) at the jumping-off location, the Blarney Stone on East 44th Street. Run a rag over the black shoes, pin the Shield to the Summer Blouse (don’t remember it ever being so cold that I had to wear the Winter Choker), pull on the white gloves, adjust the tilt of the eight-pointed uniform hat and out the door. One of us would take his car, leave it in designated parking for ‘Police Vehicles Only’ around the 108th Precinct in Long Island City, grab the Flushing #7 train two stops to Grand Central Station. No one in his right mind, especially a cop in uniform, drives into the City on St. Patrick’s Day.

East 44th Street belonged to the NYPD: we formed up in ranks along the street from Fifth Avenue to Sixth (New Yorkers call it “Sixth”, not “Avenue of the Americas”), filling it with hundreds of Irish cops in uniform, grouped by Borough of Command. The next street over belonged to the FD (New York City Fire Department), but it was the cops who stepped off first onto Fifth Avenue at noon, behind the thumps and wails of the Emerald Society Pipes and Drums Band – the pipers in kilts and tall black bear hats with a sprig of green – Himself, Det. Finbar Devine, Drum Major, all 6-feet-five of him, in the lead and counting cadence with his baton. We headed up Fifth Avenue to the wail of the pipes and assault of the drums thundering ‘The Garryowen’, ‘The Minstrel Boy,’ ‘The Wearing of the Green’. We were The Seventh Cavalry, high-flying with no need of a horse.

We marched up Fifth Avenue ten-abreast, feet and swinging arms keeping faith to Finbar’s time. We passed the Cathedral, its steps crowded with the faithful and The Cardinal. Ice skaters abandoned the Rockefeller Center Rink to get a gander at us. People crowded the balconies of East Side residences, hung out the windows of office buildings, ignored the horse-drawn hansom cabs outside the Plaza Hotel at 59th Street and Central Park. Our route was straight as a die for 42 City blocks, past the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 81st Street. Its steep stone stairway rising to the front door, hundreds of watchers filling its steps, when I looked left and up, I saw the Pyramid of the Sun in the dead Mexican City of Teotihuacan. A sharp right turn onto 86th Street and down to the end of the Parade Route at Third Avenue and 86th. No one was tired; the City lay before us; Irish cops were the Chosen.

Then an unhurried descent down Third with forays to Second Avenue along the way. Like the Pony Express riders in the Old West, we’d stop at way-stations to refresh the horses. Every Irish bar from 86th to 22nd Street received us. McFadden’s, The Mean Fiddler, Ulysses’, Ryan’s Daughter, Hibernia, Finnegan’s Wake, Nancy Whiskey Pub, the Failte Irish Whiskey Bar – to mention a few – and finally Molly Malone’s at 22nd Street, the unofficial end-of-tour, appropriately around the corner from the Police Academy on East 20th Street. We drank for free – “on the arm” is the term of art – at all these places. It was accepted as demeaning to ask a cop in uniform to pay for his drinks on St. Patrick’s Day. But we tipped the barmaids handsomely, sang the old songs gustily, and behaved decorously.

Perhaps I’m mistaken in some of that. After all, it was a very long time ago.

Robert Knightly

Was Saint Patrick Italian?

Tomorrow is my birthday. I say this not to elicit well-wishes (though I always enjoy receiving them), but to muse on the experience of having been born on a day famous for another reason.

Being of Italian descent, I was on track, as baby girls of my persuasion usually were, to be named after one of my grandmothers (about which you have heard if you follow this blog). So I would likely have been called Sabina Maria or maybe Concetta after my maternal and paternal grandmoms. But when I debuted on March 17th, my parents chose Patricia for me.

Having Saint Paddy’s Day as a birthday has a lot of advantages. For one, people don’t forget. When shamrocks show up on supermarket windows and on mirrors behind bars in drinking holes, my friends and family all know my birthday is coming. Also, my day has a color. Green has been my favorite all my life. Luckily it suits me. And these days, unless people are talking about the machinations of Moammar Qadaffi, calling any product or process green is a huge compliment. Best of all, everyone celebrates. What other birthday but the 4th of July comes with a parade? When I was four years old, my uncle told me the march on Fifth Avenue was in my honor. Tomorrow midtown will fill up with revelers, giving my natal day a special jubilatory flair.

The only drawback for me has been that some Irish people have considered it a travesty that a Sicilian-Neapolitan-American should have chosen “their” day to be born. They think only people like my friend and fellow St. Patrick’s Day birthday holder Terrence O’Brien deserve to be born on March 17th. In the Catholic school cultural rivalries of my youth, I had to withstand a great deal of resentment—some of it not so benign. My brother Andy and my friend Danny Gubitosa leapt to my defense in a play-yard altercation one March 17th by claiming that St. Patrick was Italian—an assertion that only further enraged my detractors.

According to Wikipedia though, Danny and Andy were sort of right. Paddy was a Romano-Britain, and though the historical details of his life are sketchy, substantiated evidence reveals that as a 16 year old, he was abducted from Britain by Irish raiders and dragged off to Ireland to be a slave—not a very auspicious beginning for a relationship between Saint and faithful fated to endure for millennia. Patrick made it back home, and once ordained, he returned to Ireland as a missionary and prelate. The Irish still invoke him against snakes and witches.

Coat of Arms, Murcia

Why the following is true I leave you to ponder, but evidently St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated not only in Ireland and the Roman Catholic Archdioceses of New York and of Boston, but also in Nigeria, Montserrat, Loiza, a small town on the north coast of Puerto Rico, and Murcia, the capital of an Autonomous Community founded by Moors in the southeast of Spain.

—Annamaria Alfieri