Oh, to Be in Ireland on St. Paddy’s Day

Uncle Dennis O’Brien, brother of my grandmother, Bridget O’Brien Joyce, was walking down Burnside Street in Portland, Ore. He was 6-feet-4, and had just come out of the woods where he worked as a lumberjack nine months a year.

Grandma always said he was the largest Irishman since Finn McCool, a legendary Fenian born 300 years before the birth of Christ, and educated in the forest by a poet.

Uncle Dennis was like a great bear come to town in his boots and his red-and-black Mackinaw and his lion’s mane of red hair. He knew Shakespeare like the rest of us know “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” reading the plays by kerosene lamplight in the logging camp.

A smaller man came up to Uncle Dennis and asked him if he would like to be in a motion picture, so perfect did he look for a role requiring him to stand around and lend believability to some Method actor who was trying to play the part of a woodsman.

It pains me to tell you that Uncle Dennis knocked the small man to the sidewalk, right there on Burnside near the bridge. He said, “Don’t be insulting your betters,” and strode into the next saloon.

Now, Uncle Dennis meant nothing unfriendly in flattening the man. He was just looking to save a bit of time for both of them. He was not an actor. He was a logger. And he didn’t intend to make himself a mockery, for so he judged the man’s work to be.

Uncle Dennis came out of the woods for the last time at 86, went to Grandma Joyce’s house across from St. Francis Church, walked upstairs, crawled into the high brass bed and died.

Grandma used to warn my father, “Do y’see, now, Johnny, what I’m telling you about the drink? Look at the way the drink took Dennis.” And so it did. The drink and 65 years in the woods. But surely, it was not a bad way to live and then, to die. After he left Clifden in Connemara in the west of Ireland for the tall forests of the Cascade Range, he spent his life in the scent of moss and fir and the sounds of creeks and small animals. He had Shakespeare for company and his memories of Gaelic stories that were old when poor Caesar came to Ireland. Poor Italian gentleman, off on a fool’s war.

Once a Catholic priest, new to the United States from the south of Ireland, a softer place than the rocky mountains of the west, came to our house to make a parish call. He introduced himself and Mama said her name was Mrs. John Michael Joyce.

The poor, round-faced young man almost fell off the porch and said, “Ah, but they’re a terrible people. They throw their enemies into the sea.”

And they probably did. Anyone who had traveled that far through those steep mountains was probably too tired to fight back.

In Clifden in the heart of the Joyce country, there is a pub called Humanity Dick’s. It is named after the man who founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and built the pub, which is reputed to have the best lunch anywhere in Ireland. You can see straight through it, from the sidewalk out the vast window, which looks out over the Bay of Clifden to the wild, gray Atlantic.

Daddy said the Joyces are the only people in Ireland who have never bowed the knee to any English monarch. Poor, handsome Essex, sitting by an outpost fire and cursing his queen who sent him to Ireland as a rite of bravery, must have hated it. Even bloody Cromwell never got as far as Connemara.

Maybe they didn’t even want to. It’s a man-eating country. It is still Celtic, one of the few places where that ancient people has survived unchanged. Connemara, Wales, Brittany, the Highlands of Scotland and the Ring of Kerry.

Merle Severy says, “The Celts have left us haunting love tales, wondrous sagas, poetic bardic lore, not to mention the mesmerizing imagery of Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Dylan Thomas.”

All this from a people who introduced iron for weapons about the time Romulus and Remus were ready for solid food.

I wish I had been in Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day or any day at all, leaning on the seawall at Youghal where the sea is soft on the sands.

Or with my friend Audrey Ann Marie Boyle having a glass of stout in Humanity Dick’s and looking out the window to the sea hoping to catch a glimpse of a Galway fishing boat making the breakwater with its triangle sail shaped like an angel’s wing, low in the water with the weight of fish in the hold.

This year again, I give you:

Wishing you always

Walls for the wind

And a roof for the rain

A tankard by the fire

Laughter to cheer you

And those you love near you

And all that your life might desire.