Saint Patrick’s Day, but make it gay

Saint Patrick’s Day wasn’t a thing in my family. Donning the green, or hanging a shamrock on the front door, were moot points to my Italian-American family. Besides, many a snarky one of my ethnic siblings will tell any Irish descendant, 

“Well, Saint Patrick was Roman. He was an original Italian…so?”  

Even the Irish potato candy was banished from our house. It was seen as a curse. It was one long ago March 17th that my grandparents, who adopted and raised me, discovered their schizophrenic daughter had run away. The night before, my grandmother Madeline (later my mother) and my mother Lisa (later my sister) made the confection. 

This confection production was especially out of character for Madeline. Her relationship with cooking was limited to traditional meals learned from Caroline, her Sicilian-born mother. (I only remember Caroline’s beating a raw egg into hot marinara sauce as a curious childhood after-school snack.) Later dishes were learned from my grandfather (later my father), Bucky’s Calabrian mother.

As for Nonna Caroline? On the farm in Sicily, she was assigned to the sewing room and the duty of washing laundry by hand in a body of water. It may have been a large barrel, but a body still. When she made pizza during the Depression, the dough was bought from the local baker back in Philly. I do not mean to say the cooking was bad! It was a repetition of ancestral foods with American mid-century things like steak, baked apples with pork or ham, and Salisbury steaks. I still make those, by the way. Despite the 1980s appropriation of my suburban youth:  Taco Tuesday? This was only once celebrated. 

“You bite into it, and it falls apart, makes a mess,” was the dining review given by Madeline. “What’s the point?” The kit was never purchased again. Which is just fine by me, now I know real tacos.

But my palate was already strong. I once asked mom to bring home a can of Chef Boy-R-Dee and decried it as pizza sauce. 

But back to March 17th. 

While the potato candies were seen as a curse by my mother, my father had a fondness for many things Irish. Especially crimson-haired Maureen O’Hara in many John Wayne movies. While Daddy never went to hang shamrocks, he did a fine Irish accent by way of Hollywood. He also requested corned beef and cabbage every Saint Patrick’s Day.

Yet how could the sainted Madeline stomach the beef, but not the candy?

Furthermore, I always wondered if the birthfather was not Italian? It was astounding to think of heresy to meatballs on Sunday. Like the shock of when my husband (then fiancé) told my teenage cousin David that he was a Baptist, not my and my family’s Roman Catholic. 

The idea of his culture was seemingly more mysterious or taboo than who he actually might be. 

It was about six years ago when I learned the truth. Someone on Facebook contacted a cousin of mine via our last name. Looking for Lisa. This woman, slightly younger than me, claimed she may be my half-sister. 

The circumstances of shared memory were astonishing. Lisa recalled birthfather as having long hair, being a musician, and as it was the 1970s, living in a van in Long Beach or Santa Monica. Lisa said, years later, he was gay or bi. My (would-be) half-sister confirmed these things. And, one memory in particular sealed the deal: He dealt acid. Lisa claimed to conceive me on acid! 

I won’t go into too much detail about the birthfather. He is very private. But Lisa’s elusive schizophrenic memory was remarkably lucid. I can tell you stories about giant squirrels if you ApplePay me. Birthfather’s on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. He was happy I had a good family. He was proud to learn that I am a gay writer.

A note on Lisa: She came home from adventures by the time I was five-years-old. She willingly let me be adopted. However, as she aged, medications left her unable to keep up with her mental health issues. Madeline committed her to a facility a few years ago. This was before mommy passed away at 92.

So, birthfather is not “straight.” As an older man, Lisa always said she wanted a gay son (later brother). 

“It was the hardest sex I ever had,” she said. “You had to be a gay boy.” 

But, to me, more importantly than sharing not being straight in common with my birthfather, he’s Italian-American! I am, through his sperm, basically all Southern Italian. Madeline, Sicilian. Bucky, Calabrian. Birthfather, Apuglian. The football to the heel. 

But only his paternal half has a vowel at the end of the family name. 

“His mother was mostly Irish, but she had some Blackfoot in her, too,” my half-sister told me. 

I’m a something-teenth Native-American! 

“By the way,” she added. “You’re one of nine.” 

More about that later! 

What a revelation! Bucky spent time in the West and fell in love with what his generation called “Indians.” Dad loved the Irish. Were he alive, he might be pleased. Certainly, he’d be blown away by the Blackfoot lineage. 

But, we’re sticking to the Irish side. My favorite cousin, Joy, was first contacted by the birthfather’s daughter. Joy, who looks like a combination of Cher from Moonstruck and Fran Drescher, once scoffed at my making corned beef and cabbage for the holiday. 

“Eww, why are’ya makin that? You’re not even Irish…well, maybe a little bit,” she said. Then, in her typical attitude, “Eww, the smell.” 

I really make it because I like the cliche of it. Any real Irish-American will say their grannies served ham and potatoes. Beef was for the well-to-do. In the end, the crockpot steams away that day because my father, born in 1924, loved it. 

Now, it has more meaning as I have some Irish blood. I am a very symbolic person. Did Bucky love Irish “things” because of his boyhood among Irish boys at Catholic school? Actresses such as Maureen O’Hara, Irene Dune? Or was that just his part of it… 

Did he look at my pale complexion, my blond boyhood hair, and wonder if me, his only son and grandson, was in fact part Irish? Probably not. But maybe I long for symbolism in the everyday because I never knew my biological dad until I was in my forties. 

Symbolism, again: This past February 1st was my husband’s birthday. I learned it’s the feast of the female patron saint of Ireland, Saint Brigid. I promptly ordered a Saint Brigid’s Cross. Despite his not being Catholic, he is part-Irish. This particular cross is a Celtic symbol absorbed by the Catholic church. He loves that it’s a symbol of protection, health, and good fortune.

Cousin Joy claims no memory of her uncle Bucky eating corned beef and cabbage every year. This, despite living next door to her family in a traditional brick rowhome. That’s Phillyspeak for a townhouse. We shared a connecting wall for many years. 

This lack of her memory regarding corned beef is actually beautiful. Sometimes our treasury of memories is how special, how secret, how (that word again) symbolic it is. Both my parents are now gone, and Lisa is apart, now living in what my family, smilingly and bittersweetly, refers to as “her own little world.” Happily for her, not for me perhaps, she forgets, sometimes, that our parents are now no more. So, selfishly in a way, I cherish perhaps it’s only me who carries my father Bucky’s memory of Saint Patrick’s Day.