My mother was Kathleen McDonald, whose father, James McDonald, came over from County Louth (the “wee” county), in Ireland, to work, not too happily, as a postman in Brooklyn. As long as I can remember, St. Patrick’s Day has been a party featuring green clothing and brown drinks (e.g., Guinness and whiskey), and Jeanne and I follow the tradition to this day, including notes or phone calls to faraway Irish friends to talk about parties past.
The whole family enjoyed these convivial festivities. Although my dad, Harry Meinke, came from stoic German stock, he enjoyed any holiday that included extra drinks, so was happy to join in the annual St. Patty’s Day party. And Jeanne’s family branches from ancient Welsh/English stock: close enough, we figure, to qualify for an Irish celebration.
As children we often heard the phrase “the luck of the Irish,” and were told this luck could be augmented by finding a four-leaf clover. This resulted in my sisters and I spending hours scouring the sparse grass in our Flatbush neighborhood. There wasn’t a lot of greenery on our block, so we would head on occasion to nearby Marine Park where there was at least some grass, and — believe it or not — we did find the occasional lucky prize. I had a couple of them pressed into a book that somehow didn’t survive our various moves. (Bad luck!) Of course, as we grew older we realized we were sent on our clover hunts just to get us out of the house and out of the way (there wasn’t much talk about the real Irish symbol, the clover-like shamrock). But we grew up believing we had the luck of the Irish, and Jeanne, who believes more that we have a “guiding spirit,” saw that these beliefs easily meshed together.
We sit in our house and look out at the flowers and trees on our small lot, and think, Aren’t we lucky! We can trace our being here through a series of lucky accidents. I like to say we’re here because of Bertolt Brecht. When we moved to St. Paul, Hamline University randomly picked us to live in a house where Jim Carlson, a theater professor, lived upstairs. In the early 1960s, Jim put on the American premieres of several of Brecht’s plays (Jim had studied at the University of Minnesota under Eric Bentley, Brecht’s translator). Called into the president’s office, Jim thought he was being promoted to be director of the Theater, at last — but the president looked at him and said, “Why are you putting on all these Communist plays?”
This was the ’60s, remember.
This led to a string of “lucky accidents,” until Jim wound up founding the theater for a new and radical school (No grades! Independent study! Overseas classes!) named Florida Presbyterian College, whose new dean was a great fan of a small rule-breaking magazine, motive, where I was publishing many of my early poems (just because Jim had a subscription to it).
Of course, “the luck of the Irish” has always been a two-edged sword. As one of my tougher Brooklyn aunts once said, “Some guy goes walking and steps in dog poop, and someone else says, ‘Lucky you had your shoes on!’ Well, that’s the luck of the Irish.” (We found the same dark humor the year we lived in Poland. Next New Year’s Eve they’ll lift their vodkas, look in your eyes, and say, “May 2016 be worse than 2017.”)
Over the long years, everyone had a lot of problems, too. But I can still hear our mother playing the piano, and Dad and our favorite uncle, my mother’s alcoholic, golden-voiced brother, singing their hearts out at those St. Patrick’s Day parties; and I think we were pretty lucky.
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2016.