A Little St. Patrick’s Day Post OR It Takes Talent to by the Town Alcoholic in a Town of Irish Alcoholics.

In honor of St. Patty’s Day I’m going to tell you a little story.

It may or may not have absolutely nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day, or even St. Patrick himself. (Hard to believe I don’t know him personally, right?)

I have red hair, pale skin and green eyes. You can probably guess that I’m Irish. The truth is, I am a tiny little fraction Irish, I just managed to look most like what my Irish ancestors probably looked like, instead of the Sicilian-German mix I mostly am. (Bitter? Me? NEVER.) Anyhow. I said I had a story and it’s not about how I wish the dark, Sicilian genes had maybe gotten mixed up in my DNA a little bit.

Almost ten years ago I went to Ireland for the first time, also my first trip to Europe. I was newly eighteen, which meant I could drink legally there. I happened to be going with my family though so thoughts of getting drunk with all the cute irish boys were quickly squashed. That doesn’t mean my father didn’t take me out, get me drunk, then challenge me to some intellectual conversation–because he totally did. Twice. All the while laughing at me while he ordered me another pint.

We spent the majority of this vacation in what we called the Moon Mobile, a tiny, goofy-looking car that barely kept us from flying over the edges of mountain passes. We traveled all over the country side, visiting castles, pubs, cute little towns and conversing with the locals through the drivers side window as we passed within inches of their car on the tiny little roads. I took endless amounts of pictures  of the vast velvety green-ness, all the sheep and even pigeons–just because they were Irish. I was in love with the country; it was so beautiful, both the landscapes and the people.

Towards the end of our trip we ended up in County Clare, where my great-grandmother immigrated from. Once there, we got out of our moon mobile and started hopping electric fences to get to old graveyards, determined to find some long lost dead relatives. We nearly got charged by a bull (it may have been my hair that triggered it), almost got electrocuted, and I stepped on more graves than I ever care to again. Despite all that, we never did find any. We eventually rolled up into this town, and were kind of surprised. My mom had no idea that her grandma was from this cute little town on the ocean, with cliffs and greenery everywhere. She had never spoke about where she came from.

My great-uncle, whom you may remember from Christmas, had been to Ireland before and had–supposedly–found the house she grew up in. He even took a picture of it and so nicely gave it to us so we could find it again. Seeing that the town was minuscule, we figured we wouldn’t have a hard time finding it.

We circled through once, but no luck. Circled twice, looking a little harder. Still no house. We circled AGAIN. What the fuck, Great Uncle? This house didn’t exist. So we started asking people where the O’Brien house was.

“Martin O’Brien? He had a thing for the drink, eh?”

No one knew where he lived, but apparently he was well known for his alcoholism, even to people who had never actually met him. (Martin was my great-great-grandfather) We heard this over and over again, to the point where we started finishing people’s sentences and they’d just grin and nod knowingly at us.

We were about to give up when we passed this man who had to have been older than dirt on the side of the road. We figure he must know, he probably was the oldest member of this town by a good 30 years.

This man had to have been at least 100 years old. HE would know where this is.

Now, to make this story great, you have to know some backstory on my Great Great Grandfather, Martin. You see, he was a whiskey barrel maker, hence the immense liking he took for alcohol. He was also a poet. One poem even got published and my entire family knows all about it. Unfortunately, I don’t know how the poem goes and couldn’t find it in a google search, but I’ll sum it up for you. It was during the potato famine and in this particular poem, he spoke of how he cut down his neighbors oak tree for fire wood. Not very nice of him to cut down someone else’s tree, but he probably was drunk. And hungry. And cold.

Anyway. So there’s that poem, which is published somewhere and which makes us all believe we’re just a little bit famous and entitled…to something. To being more Irish than the next person, I guess.

So we stop the car, approach this old man who literally had snot encrusted on his nose, who was practically blind AND deaf and was older than anyone I’d ever met in my life. After a few tries of yelling my G-G-Grandpa’s name into his ear he finally gets it and you can see the lightbulb go off.

Ah. MARTY. (he snarled. We just looked at each other, he apparently didn’t like Marty too much but apparently knew him personally since he used his nickname!)

That bastard chopped down my tree.

Our mouths hit the floor. HE WAS THE GUY! THAT WAS HIS TREE! THE POEM! RAINBOWS! UNICORNS!

He talked a little bit about him and how he was still a little bitter about the chopping of the tree incident but he did indeed know where the home was. It was located in a field, just around the corner.

We pulled into the driveway, with this new-ish looking house and asked the guy standing outside where the O’Brien house was. He pointed to a pile of rocks in the backyard that resembled something of a foundation. Something that used to be a house.

Which made a ton more sense than the clapboard house my Great uncle had shown us.

We gathered that he had no luck finding the house and had turned to the pub and a few pints of Guinness. Once there, he probably told the locals about his woes, and them feeling bad for him, got him even more drunk and took him out somewhere and showed him a random house.

That’s the only explanation we could come up with as to why he sent us a bright blue, one story house when the house really was a pile of gray stones sitting in the middle of a field.

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