Why The Blog Has Changed Color For the Week

The green is for St Patrick's Day. But so is the orange, because they're both in the Irish flag.

I'd better explain here that I spent 4 marvelous years working in  a tiny branch library in the Irish section of the North Bronx. It was only a mile or two from my own neighborhood, but another world.

Start with the bars. The main drag of the neighborhood had at least 4 on a 6 block strip, whereas the Jewish neighborhood I grew up in had none. I'm pretty sure it was more a matter of "neighborhood" pubs, rather than people wanting to go barhopping, but it still was a surprise.

I did a Google on the neighborhood and found a Wikipedia article that claims there are TWENTY bars in the area. Not surprising to me now...........

Many of the families were first generation--what my mother calls "right off the boat", though in their case it was the airplane. You could usually tell which families were which because the immigrant families were larger.  The American born families tended to have just  two or three kids--obviously the priests were talking "natural" family planning, but the women were giving nature a bit of help....

The local public school was excellent, but most of the kids went to a local Catholic school where the teachers were being imported from Ireland. They may have been great teachers, but teaching Irish/British spelling and lengthy units on the potato famine were NOT getting the kids ready for higher learning in America!

What startled me most was how INSULAR they were. This quote from John Powers' wonderful book "The Last Catholic In America" pretty much sums it up:

Although most of the men of Seven Holy Tombs worked in other parts of Chicago, the vast majority of residents thought you needed a visa in orderto get out of the neighborhood for more than one day at a time.....We children of Seven Holy Tombs believed that the edge of the earth lay two blocks beyond the cemeteries. Most of the adults felt that it was somewhat farther than that....... 

They were in NYC--one of the world's greatest cities.Yet the only times they seemed to set foot out of the neighborhood was to go to the airport to visit family back in Ireland. No one ever seemed to go "downtown" to Manhattan.

Except for one day of the year. And where did they go that day? To the theater? To the museums? To the tourist spots, like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building? Shopping?

Nope, nope, nope!!

What they did was go down to the St Patrick's Day parade. I'd see huge groups heading to the subway on that day. 

Undoubtedly a lot of families were going down to see Daddy marching in the parade--perhaps with the police or fire department groups. Lots of cops and firemen lived in the neighborhood. And I'm sure that on 9/11 most of the neighborhood was mourning people that they knew and loved....

One year, coming out of the local store, that was hung from one end of the (low) ceiling to the other with green balloons, shamrocks and "Erin Go Bragh" signs, I got so exasperated, I swore I was going to wear my neon orange vest on St Patrick's Day!

Of course, I didn't. And I'm not turning the WHOLE blog orange. (Though I did think about it)

But that's why the orange border is there.

Enjoy your St Paddy's Day.  At our house we're having corned beef--Jewish style.   And we're eating it Filipino style--with lots of rice.

And not a shamrock to be seen...................................

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