When Sweet Words Catch Your Ear

I have vexed a lady in Ventura on two counts. The first one I can wiggle out of. On the second, I will just flapdoodle around because she is right.

It was the column that appeared on St. Patrick’s Day. The lady’s name is Elaine O’Brien, and she’s probably a cousin because my paternal grandmother was named Bridget O’Brien.

I wonder if Elaine has ever been to Dromoland Castle, the centuries-old seat of the O’Briens. As you enter the castle, you walk down a long gallery with portraits of departed O’Briens. It gave me a start to see all those people looking like Aunt Sarah Cowan and Dennis O’Connor hanging, stern-visaged, on the wall. I wonder why portraits of that era are never of people smiling. Maybe it’s hard to hold a smile while you’re posing for an artist.

Elaine objected to the headline on the column, which said, “Oh, to Be in Ireland on St. Paddy’s Day.”

She writes, “When did this day become St. Paddy’s Day? In New York, we always said St. Patrick’s Day.”

And we do in Los Angeles, too, Elaine, if we are of Irish heritage. It is the day we pay honor to the patron saint and we do not give him a barroom nickname. But many people celebrate the day because it’s fun and they say Paddy with affection, not disrespect. Although I, like New Yorkers, call the good green saint by his given name.

And, Elaine, columnists do not write the headlines that run above their columns. This is done by the people on the View copy desk. These are wonderfully bright and quick people who have encyclopedic minds full of myth, fact and fancy. Not only do they write headlines, they read all the copy that goes into the section, mercifully catching errors and saving face for the writers. I promise you whoever wrote that headline meant no disrespect, nor would St. Patrick have fit in the space allotted for the headline.

Now for the flapdoodle. Elaine says, “Your columns are always so blithe in spirit and meticulous in factual information that I have to call your attention to a real boo-boo. Caesar and the Romans never came to Ireland. They came to England, but not Ireland. As any Irishman will tell you, ‘They didn’t dare.’ ”

Elaine, you are absolutely right. Caesar made his first crossing to Britain with two legions in 55 BC and made a landing on the coast of Kent. The second invasion took him clear across the Thames where a British prince with his war chariots nipped away at the Roman columns and Caesar went back to Gaul, which he immediately divided into three parts as every high school freshman taking Latin knows.

The evidence of the Romans’ stay in England is wide: their aqueducts, bridges and all of those places ending in chester, which is from the Latin word, castro, or camp (unless Beverly Hills High School’s Miss Edwards had it wrong, which would shake everything I trust).

The Romans made no mention of invading Ireland, but in about the 3rd Century BC the Celts invaded and where those boys spat, no grass grew ever.

Elaine O’Brien did not call me on describing Caesar as a “poor Italian gentleman, off on a fool’s war.” Italy did not exist in his time. I wrote it for the sound of it. “Roman gentleman” has the clanging sounds of legions marching, of battle flags flying and chariot wheels rolling. It is a phrase without pity or empathy. I meant no diminution of Italy, but giving Caesar’s home territory its contemporary name brings him down to a more human size, a brave and resourceful, not very tall man with with a bowl haircut.

I used the sentence for its sound, its cadence, and it was wrong. But as you might say about another monarch trying to fight a war hundreds of miles and oceans away from his supplies, “Poor old George III fighting a fool’s war against a rag-tag army of farmers and woodsmen with balky muskets and not enough ammunition.”

Of course, George never left the comforts of the court and nice, domestic Queen Charlotte.

That, Elaine, is flapdoodle. It is also a rationale as full of holes as a honeycomb. I used the phrase because I liked its sound, which is a precarious procedure especially when nice people like Elaine expect “factual information” from me.

I am repentant, but not enough to promise that I won’t do it again if a phrase falls into my mind that has the sound of Alpine goat bells or water over round stones. But not about Gaius Julius Caesar. That kid is safe from my self-indulgent maunderings. Ave, Caesar, and mea culpa.