McAir

The first time I flew overseas, I was 19 and flying with my working class boyfriend from Brooklyn, which meant we were already connected before we stepped foot on the plane. His older brother had a union job at Aer Lingus, the Irish airline, because of his Irish roots. We'd been regaled with funny stories at their local bar in Bay Ridge about the comic misadventures of the shanty set, a colloquialism derived from the derogatory term for low class Micks who're "Shanty Irish", as it relates to their less-than-stellar housing situations. Irish "on the dole" live in sponsored housing just like here, called "Council Flats"; a mindset reflected in their cumbersome responses to international flight, as well.

We'd already heard from his brother Doug about the neighborhood guy he booked on a cheap flight as a favor, who'd stuffed as many American-made jeans as he could into a bunch of garbage bags that he crammed into the plane's overhead compartments, only to be foiled by the physics of storage that found his loot exploding into the aisle before being escorted off the plane by security, because illegal contraband is in violation of several international laws. He'd sheepishly explained to them that good jeans were hard to find in Ireland, and at the late 80s price of $10-25 a pair (depending on the buyer), he'd be sure to make a killing that'd sponsor several flights back and forth.

Ya, right? It was true, too. Levi's jeans were a thousand times better than the tacky, cheaply-made, thinly-fabricated knock-offs available to foreign markets at the time, with their poorly placed pockets and overly long pants legs that scraped the ground to become tattered around the cuffs rather early on. They just didn't look right, especially on Europeans. We'd been, in a word, "prepped" for our experience beforehand, and our fellow fliers did not disappoint us on this first, uniquely Celtic crossing.

After being seated, I'd already seen the most handsome Catholic priest in collar I'd ever seen in my life; a beautiful blond boy barely in his 20s, young-looking like us. Whew...Irish clergy were different. His brother Doug had a nice surprise waiting for us, too. He'd tried to bump us "up" into First Class, but the stewardess told us Brian Dennehy, the well-known American actor, had already been seated there, as she handed us a couple of Mimosas. Ah, best to be careful about it, then. With that, we were already plugged into local gossip. She said it was being told that Mr. Dennehy was looking to buy a pub in Dublin (the big stars do that as investments, like Bono from U2), and a potential deal that could be so financially favorable was to be supported by all of us, especially if we were keen for an economic boost, which we were.

As nervous a flier as I can be during long flights with turbulence, I'd never felt safer than I was on that flight, bolstered as we were by a large gaggle of nuns seated in coach with us. Surely, G-d won't knock us out of the sky with this many clergy on board? And you know what? He didn't! It was a smooth ride until the prop plane trip to Amsterdam, but even the weather gods can't do much about that. Like my first time to Italy, I swore as we left on our returning flight from Galway that I'd be back to Ireland, and I'm proud to write that I kept my promise, even at great expense to myself. Would you expect any less? I wouldn't. To you and yours on this special Irish holiday month, and for every day after. Be safe.

Telenovela

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenovela#

My grandfather practiced his Spanish by watching Univision (our Spanish-language channel here in New York) telenovelas, with his drugstore black-rimmed glasses and a small Spanish-to-English dictionary in hand for quick translations, sitting way too close to the t.v. with the sound blasting. It was great fun for us to see him watching his daily shows, too, because he could be such a tough Mick from the city at times, tempered as it was by his consideration for others and his innate sweetness. He wasn't just learning for the heck of it, either, though with his cool old-time vaudeville impersonations and great accents, his flair for language and communication was proof enough that he'd kissed "The Blarney Stone" probably more than once.

No, he did it because his older brother, my Uncle Jack, married a Colombian woman after his divorce, my Aunt Yolanda; a tall woman with a naturally majestic presence indicative of a native high-born to a good family from the mountains outside of Bogota. And it didn't stop there. My grandparents took a few trips to see them after they relocated to Colombia, once my uncle retired from his successful business that found him financially independent. They had two beautiful little boys I remember holding and changing at our house, as a little girl: Juan y Francis, with their classic mestizo coloring of olive skin, light eyes, and lush brown curls. Irish paired well with Colombian!

It was important to my grandfather that his brother's family feel comfortable in his home, and it was important to me, too. As guests, they could curse telling stories and smoke in my mother's house (my dad had to go outside or in the garage to smoke), while I refilled their glasses and emptied out the big glass ashtray we used for parties and holidays. Francis had fallen asleep, so me and my aunt took him into my parent's bedroom for a nap, using their pillows to make a barrier on either side of him so he wouldn't roll off the bed. I was so nervous about the baby that I kept going in to check on him, with their laughter following me down the hallway. "Is he still there?"

He was, and they were charmed by my youthful inexperience with newborns. "Oh, he'll sleep for hours not moving, Marie. He's fine!" Uh, you don't know that! My own parents weren't exactly careful with kids, and my uncle drank a lot more than I was used to with my more even-keeled grandfather. Still, they were raucous and fun, and we loved having a South American branch to our family tree that we'd describe as one big carnival tent for times when were we feeling less generous. Before they arrived at my parent's house, we went over simple phrases and basic sayings so we could greet them from the top of the stairs as they came through the front door. 

"I want to be able to greet my brother's family properly when I see them", my grandfather nervously explained to me again while we practiced. My grandparents always felt insecure about their lack of a formal education, because they had to leave school to earn money for their families as children. I could relate. I wanted to make a good impression, too, because in our households, family always came first. You did great, grandpa. You really did. It was just perfect.

para mi tía Yolanda

Proud to be a N*gga

My cousin Kenny is proud to be a n*gga, because he's told me that more than once, even singing it to me like this: "...bee-cause I'm proud to be a niggggaaaah!" His cellphone used to have a recording of him singsonging "Kennndaahhhl!" every friggin' time it went to voicemail, which drove my ex-boyfriend crazy, because John would need help at the yard and "Ken Doll" couldn't be bothered; exactly what we'd come to expect from a fat, bald, 6'1, Celtic-Jewish-Indian like him.

He never wanted to fit in with the 9-5 crowd, and for years, he struggled to find work that was inoffensive to his cocktail party persona, before he finally settled on joining a pipe-and-drum band near the beach. He's good at it, too! He and his then-girlfriend (now wife) played together at the biggest parades 'round the way, turning their alcoholism into a somewhat respectable McOpportunity. It wasn't what I'd want for him, but he's made a life from the broken shards of his rough Brooklyn upbringing that's left most of his family dead, and he's not even 50, yet.

I just hope someday he'll realize he doesn't have to jettison parts of his identity that he feels he needs to hide in order to fit in with typical American society, because I personally know of a clan that would dearly love to have a musician with the heart of an Irishman, the beat of an Indian, with the soul of the faithful play at their tartan-clad family gatherings on a certain New Scotland beach. We pay with real money, too. My father always used to tell us as kids that we should be proud of who we are, because it's not like we had a say in the matter, and he's right. We don't. It's already happened.

Remember, my Americans: the freedoms you take for granted have not been equally extended. Some of us can't even walk on ancestral lands and feel proud about it, without someone else looking to take it away to sell it back for a fee. Think about that while you bitch about the line at the polls, or your simple black-and-white racism, or any of the other issues that you think take precedence over basic human rights like dignity and equality. We're not there, yet with this country, but some of us would really like it to be. They're colored, too, just not like you.

By Any Other Name

You probably know by now that the American immigrant experience isn't some "la-di-da" fantasy concocted solely by rich Hollywood filmmakers and gay Broadway producers. The streets weren't paved with gold when my ancestors arrived here (nor are they now) because they built this city, and dozens of others like it, too. If it was paved at all back then, it was put down in the sizzling heat that is New York's hot summer sun, made with durable Rockland County gravel (hence the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockland_County,_New_York), padded with the well-trodden horse-shit from so many carriages, that fragrantly emanated from between the big paving stones in the heat.

My grandfather told me stories about "The El" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Third_Avenue_Line & (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line), a newly-elevated carriage service that rode high above the stink of the messy cobblestone streets that was turn-of-the-century New York City, in a pleasant riding experience that had velvet ropes for them to hang onto, while standing between the fancy crushed-velvet seats. Quite an experience for a native-born Brooklyn boy like my grandfather to have as a child, used as he was to the small family farms that still lined Brooklyn's streets back then, with double-wide avenues functioning as one big farm route that was conducive to trade between rural crop-producing Long Island and the borough of Manhattan: http://www.bklynlibrary.org/brooklyncollection/historic-brooklyn-photographs.

As great and hard as our real life experiences could be in this land of our birth, it was not always so for many other poor immigrant families, burdened as they were by a lack of education and native know-how. My ex's family was like that. Even though he had the privilege of his mother's ancient Indian lines—for precious government money, land rights, and serious tuition breaks—his father's Polish family fared less well in upstate New York, when it came to free handouts earned from the backs of our joint ancestral labors. It made them twitchy and greedy when it came to earning off of us as a people, competing in the wild marketplace that freedom brings. It makes people nervous about surviving here, you know? Winter's always coming.

Besides immigrant dreams that turned out not to be true, they also wrongly believed that the death-defying boat ride to New York during wintertime was bad, starving as they were then, with a few hastily-shoved potatoes in their dirty pockets, in between sudden squalls at sea and pulls off a bottle of homemade vodka. Uh uh, homies. It gets so much worse. Like, much much worse. My friend Linda's family were Muslims from Russia and Poland who had their name changed immediately upon arrival to Ellis Island, for the comfort of the paper-processing government workers who were basically illiterate. She knew that because her grandmother told her her own emigre story, and she told it to me, not that Linda was always truthful with me. Some families are just tricky like that, you know?

Her white Muslim grandmother married a Mongolian man before they emigrated further east, becoming "Janowski" for ease of travel through Poland and Russia, which was then changed once again to "Janow" here in America—to ease their arrival experience—and that's what my friend Dave's dad did, too, though he told it to me in the tone of a perpetually aggrieved, long-suffering people. "We had to change it, just to get work in 'the unions'. All the unions were run by the Irish back then!", he would explain to us over a dinner of kielbasa and German baked potatoes au gratin with bacon and cheddar melted on top (bless you, Ginger: you know upstate winters, mama!). And that's exactly what his grandfather, his father, and then, he did: they went from being proud, big, strong, Polish-American  "Budzanowski" Catholic boys (http://www.thetreemaker.com/family-coat-b/budzanowski/poland.html), to pseudo Irish-Americans, in a state that has one of the biggest Irish immigrant populations outside of "Eire": http://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2013/03/15/americas-most-irish-towns/#59703e0a495e.

Anyway, it was a common enough story among Americans in this vast wilderness that can be the American experience. Anything can happen, at any time. Birth certificates could be falsely-made, and then just as easily lost. Names were quickly taken up and easily discarded, for a variety of reasons: for work, to escape notice as a convict on the run, or to hide the "blackness" behind the real origins of your "low" birth, like a poor native girl who just took on the faith of her loving husband, as Catholics assume during the Rite of Confirmation. 

I willingly chose to take on my grandmother's American name "Ann" in the French spelling (she was baptized "Angelina") to also honor St. Anne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Anne), my patron saint of Confirmation, so as to commemorate that time period forever through divine ordination onto my name, which officially makes my name "Marie Louise Anne Doucette". I pronounced it in French for an older friend of mine here at the local library, which was totally impenetrable to him, and then I said it again in perfectly unaccented English, because it can be that dissimilar with a change in pronunciation. 

I know how tricky names can be, as well as the risks involved with naming. It can (or could) mean life or death for some of us, still. It couldn't have been easy for my former in-laws to "pass" as Irish-born back then, but I did understand the economic and cultural pressures his family felt, to conform and survive as "strangers in a strange land". Luckily, he found his squaw in high school, and it isn't like Polish/Russian-born people are exactly "new" to the deep cold of a Northern climate, just our like indigenous people. We need(ed) the change of seasons to remain healthy, because our climate does a lot of good things to our bodies, for the continued health of our tribe. 

Anyway, we found each other through the ensuing centuries of assimilation and madness, because New Yorkers know their own. 
I found—in a very small isolated town buried deep in the rough, dense, wild mountains of New York—an Indo-European American Indian kinda like me. You can't mess with a destiny like ours, love, because we have a "forever" kind of thing goin' on. Trust on that, peeps. We are forever wild. For you. Come find us! We want you in it with us, for real. Be in it, with us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_(New_York)

Leprechauns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun:_Origins

Sometimes the line between reality and legend can become a bit blurry, especially if you live in a Celtic kind of town that can seem exactly like the Irish villages overseas from whence we came. Nua Nua*, indeed! Much like family anywhere, we share a lot of the same personality traits, too, which is fun and confusing. Did I meet you already? I'm sure of it. You look so familiar....do you have a "doppelgänger**"? Homelands are fun, as we reconnect through the ages, making new links and strengthening those old tribal bonds that cannot be broken, no matter how thick the mists off the moor, or the fog bank rolling in from the Hudson may be. It's where the heart is.

My family often talks over one another or finishes each other's sentences, to either comic or irritating effect, depending on the context. The new version of the old game show "Family Feud" tells a similar tale told in real time, as first one sibling and then the next answers questions during the lightning round at the end of the show, hence the repeat answers that are acknowledged with more time given for the second round. It's funny and nerve-wracking to watch.

The same is true with my friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances here in town. We live oddly connected lives, whether it's through shared blood or associations of other kinds. I've made lots of new friends here, who always seem to be joined to me genetically, too, and it makes me feel the comforts of home all over again, so I thank you for that. As we enjoy re-connecting with one another here in real ways that feel right, we also share a symmetry that's aligned through the commonality of our thinking styles, habits, and tastes.

My neighbor is like that. He's Italian and Irish-American like my mom's side of the family, a link that can be easily seen and felt with the ease of our conversation, especially about food and family values, meaning he likes to eat a lot, and so do I. We've talked about diet, healthcare, fitness, nutrition, weight loss (or gain), and his part-time work as a coin collector for vending machines. He's got two jobs actually (the second is at the high school), because he has a college-age son to provide for, and another boy in the Navy. G-d Bless! We crossed paths at the local laundromat early in my new tenancy, owned by his friend who looks like he stepped right off a boat anchored in the harbor to come ashore in this century, lured by the promise of streets that are rumored to be paved with gold, which means he and Mikey are leprechauns.

Seriously. When my brothers were little, they loved the clinking of coins, the way babies like the tinkling of keys. They're the first toys kids play with, because most fathers carry one or the other in their pockets. They had those coin-collecting booklets from the post office, and all of us had piggy banks for our spare change, because in our households every penny counts, and you never know when just one penny will make a difference someday. It's good to be thrifty! Besides home economy, we learned to identity different types of coins by looking at their states and creation dates updated at the U.S. Mint.

My brothers went on to other serious nerd passions like stamps, comic books, baseball cards, and movie memorabilia, which my oldest brother presumed to be the very first fortune he would cash in, as the money he needed for his Ivy League school. Even though we didn't like his arrogance about his IQ level, he wasn't wrong. He really did go to a highly desired Ivy League school for his prestigious MBA. Way to represent New York! I was so proud at his graduation, staying in the old stone, ivy-covered dorms that give our best schools their nickname.

But, my oldest brother was depending on something else besides chance by investing in his skills (which naturally pays off for him), and bad luck was what got his precious collection. Faulty wiring or a rogue squirrel ignited a boiler fire near his basement room at my mother's house in New City, which then traveled upstairs to my middle brother's room, guaranteeing that their collectibles would definitely be lost to either smoke damage or the burning fire. They used to share a room when they were small, before the oldest got a room built downstairs for his teenage years that used to be part of our split ranch's two-car garage, so their joint collections were in both rooms that were hit. Luckily, no one was home at the time.

And that's what my new friends here in town remind me of: sweet hometown boys who still like the cheerful sound of change clinking in machines that indicate there's a profit to be had by their labors. I find it charming, adorable, and sweet that they've made a successful business out of a laundromat and the machines that serve us, and that they get along really well, too, just like family, because real families always look out for one another. Always, my dears. Always.

http://lucky-charms.wikia.com/wiki/Cereals

*   https://www.bible.com/versions/884-oc1970-cuinn-tiomna-nua-1970 
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelg%C3%A4nger

Jimmy O.D.

Years ago, I worked for a small Jewish family business in trouble. The two kids hated the business of publishing, which they tried to use for their "creative" endeavors, like screenwriting and music. It didn't work for them, because publishing is about books. And so, I was left with two spoiled "Manhattanites" who'd been told all their lives that they were gifted from their parents. Into this mess, I was charged with righting the ship of one of their Barnes and Noble imprints. It had been ditched into the gutter for being "crass" in comparison to the other Classic series of copyright-free works, which was a total joke. 

The bargain books were face-out on the shelf in every store in the nation, a fact that had become a traveling game for me. In each town, I'd look for my name on the jackets of titles I worked on, and wherever I went in America, there I was in book form, too. Because I broke my ass for two years to put it back into shape, I had a lot of pull in the company (and the industry), which gave me the power to make some tricky decisions, especially uncomfortable ones that included their family who drew income but produced no revenue. Their single daughter would sweep in from London to treat me like a Kinko's kid making copies for her, because she wanted to brag about her designer apartment that just got a write-up. Did I want to see it? They had tons of people in their lives like that, but such was the era of housewife decorators and artsy stay-at-home moms. You know the type.

When I finally conflicted artfully well with their small son over IT support (it'd been a handy weapon from Day 1 of my time), I knew I carried the whole history of desktop publishing and Mac computers with me. My enemy camp kept making petty remarks about Apple's business tactics and the inherent snobbery designers had about their corporate-sponsored trophy computers, neither of which I disputed. I pointed that out in several meetings with the enemy camp; a row of rich white men on one side, with me and my cowardly deaf mute designer on the other. She always backed out of speaking up in meetings by citing her deafness, which usually worked at stalling the machine, but not for me, because I have a deaf father. And so, when they finally realized that shutting out design and technology had dearly cost them their business edge, the son surprisingly decided it was time to finally pursue that music career full time, by touring and cutting a self-made CD, another type of business he knew I had under my belt, too.

Enter the scene one dramatic and showy character named Jimmy. The company admin gave him "advice" within my earshot about how to work me over as a client, by giving him "tips" like appealing to my Irish side and being charming, Yeah, Mick. Fooking do that. I liked Jimmy, as I typically do with my kind. He was smart, gifted, quick, and good with the older crowd who feared computers like they were boxes sent form Hell to deliberately torture them. Because he was older than me, he knew how to mock and demonize technology so that the older rich guy would cough up the dough. After all, Jimmy was a trained actor, as well as an IT guy, professional musician, lapsed Catholic, martial artist, and newly graduated fine artist.

He showed me pictures he took of his beautiful wife and classically Celtic sons: a striking "Black Irish" clan with bright blue eyes, fair skin, red lips, and dark dark hair. Yeah, I know. The boys were into Mohawk hair designs and boxing poses, which slayed me, but I wanted him to play me like a fiddle to get us what we needed, and he knew I knew the game cold. On one warm St. Pat's evening, I took the publisher's intern nephew on a long walk with me that spanned from the East 30's all the way down to Stone Street, to hear him play. It was loud brash standards (which embarrassed him a bit), but I could tell he was good. I wanted to show him support in lieu of his recent divorce, a shock that rocked him to the core.

I didn't know how bad it was until he showed up at the job with a bagel and hysteric tears, which frightened me. I told him about my own brief brush up with a marriage I'd been suckered into, but I realized it was much worse for him. His wife had done herself up buff at the gym while he worked and played around, which couldn't have meant he spent much time at home, and the kind he did was questionable at best. You don't cry onto your client's keyboard without a really bad heartache, because I paid him every penny he was worth. 

When he broke down in front of me, I knew I could either save him or lose him in that very moment. And so I did what anyone like me would do: when he bitched about his weight gain, I caught his darting red eyes, locked in on him, and told him the truth flat-out. He was in danger of something a lot more serious than a brief spat with gluttony, and he knew what I meant, because he bowed his head down for a moment. I left to get coffee in the company kitchen, and let him collect himself. By the time I came back, he'd put on a brave front with a sheepish grin. He knew I'd never fire him, but he'd embarrassed himself at work, and that was a lapse I knew he didn't do often, because I worked under the same threats as he.

After St. Patrick's Day, I only saw him once. The struggling family outfit finally let me go to "clean house", after they'd tried to use every political card they had against me. He'd done me a right turn by getting me an interview at his day job. I wasn't suited for it as a lowbrow market and I knew it, but it was good PR for me, because it let the industry know I was shopping around. I heard him gossip to the art director of a splashy photo mag there that she'd seen my portfolio with CD's. He asked her quietly: "How did it look?". She said she caught one minor error about a tiny line of 5 point copyright info placed too close to the donut whole on one disc layout (I did all my own layouts and production), but that my music creds were solid and true. I did have a famous musician or two in my book, complete with logos, booklets, cases, and all. "Shit", he said under his breath. I could see them out of the corner of my eye in his office from my vantage point in the conference room, him at his desk with her standing over him. 

The interview was over, and the next time I heard anything about Jimmy was on Facebook, because he committed suicide that winter by taking a handful of sleeping pills while home alone in Woodstock, packing up his stuff during his first Christmas alone and without his family. He'd been gracious enough to post us a good-bye photo on Facebook, with a caption below his last self-portrait that read about how tired he was, and that was the last of it. Forever.

For Jimmy 

 http://www.silive.com/obituaries/index.ssf/2011/01/james_odonnell_55.html

Immigrant

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/

Each new generation thinks they have the roughest immigrant story ever. Mass murder? Pshaw! That's nothing! My Chinese Mom caught AIDS and died from your hospitals' bad blood transfusions! That's an actual true story by the way: a Asian bookkeeper I worked with years ago didn't want to believe that my family had any difficulties at all, because I'm "white". She kept repeating how I had a "rent controlled" apartment as an example of my so-called "white privilege", which wasn't actually true at all. I found the listing on Craigslist out of sheer economic need, and it was rent-stabilized when I lived there, which is entirely different than inheriting some fixed rate kind of deal. 

My people don't get those kinds of breaks handed to them, ever. But, true to her ignorance, she shut down when I tried to talk her through a tiny (and easily accessible) fraction of my actual family roots. I gave her a brief bit about my maternal New York story; a simple-to-follow story about Italian and Irish immigrants that's easily looked up online or at Ellis Island's interactive computer. Just type in "M-E-R-C-A-D-A-N-T-E" liked I did in five seconds, for my great-grandmother's passage to America. She sputtered and stumbled over that, but's typical for a generic office environment filled with strangers. I may be Ivy, but she sure as fuck isn't, except she doesn't know how many levels my people passed on the way up to get there, because she thinks she's had it tough, and she has. We all have. That's how you become an American. 

If she couldn't handle poor Italian farmers and the Irish potato famine, she sure as fuck can't handle the Acadian genocide, or the innate racism behind the hunting and mass destruction of Metis folk, which is anyone of European and Native American ancestry (GASP! "Mixed" races getting along peacefully!!), which pretty much covers my father's early American Dutch, English, and French Canadian ancestry. I felt bad for her, but not so bad that I didn't remember that my grandmother told me she cried every day for years walking home from school, because people shouted "Guinea!" in her face as a little girl, or that people spit at my grandfather for being a lowly "Mick", as every door in the city slammed itself shut in their faces, when they had to quit school as children of "The Depression" to work in factories to support their entire family.

http://cahiersdufootball.net/blogs/teenage-kicks/tag/no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs/

It was so bad for my grandmother, that she changed her name from "Angelina" to "Ann", pretended to forget all of her native Bari tongue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_dialect), and removed her kiddie earrings that marked her a "dago"; my mother never got over the stigma behind baby Italian girls with earrings. And so, she has never pierced her ears. I had to go with my friend's British step-mom to the mall at 15, and get it done myself. Or the fact that my great-grandfather never found work again, after refrigeration closed down his job as an Iceman in the city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade), forcing my brilliant grandmother to quit elementary school, which she also cried over for many years, because all she ever wanted was to be a teacher or nurse. That's how much she loved to learn. She also helped him to collect his route's fares by riding up and the dumbwaiters for their fares, as a little girl. But it worked out. She became the MANAGER at her factory job by 20, or something extraordinary like that. I know, because I've seen the old black and white photo of her all dressed up and standing over one of her employees, who sat in a chair beneath her for their work portrait. I'm not even getting to my grandfather's long ConEd experience, or his tours on Vaudeville to earn a buck or for his Brooklyn family, or my Dad's small-time hustles as a shoe shine boy and pool hall player.

I hope you fucking choke on one more true life story from me this weekend, Cindy, as you read these real words about my researched and verified American Immigrant background. It's not some fucking  joke I made up to make you feel bad about yourself, you fucking idiot. You worked against me every single day in that bullshit office, while I worked my ass off overtime (and without pay) to cover all of your fucking asses, because I was the only Designer/Production Artist/Art Director in that fucking company with any real skills to earn us money, so that your fucking family, and your teenage kid's illegitimate kid, could fucking eat, because you're a fucking tourist to me, shithead. Choke on it, and if you don't like our hard times here, or our real life coming-up tales of woe, go the fuck back to Communist China. I'm sure they'll work you hard to kill you off in some forced labor camp, because you're one in a billion to them, and as such, easily expendable. Go fucking choke on it, bitch. That's my fucking Lady Liberty in the harbor.

And a "Happy Mother's Day" to you, as well. Bitch.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2011/06/the-distance-to-the-past.html

for Ann

https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/passenger

I love a parade

The problem with typical Irish-American culture are all the nasty stereotypes that go along with it, the biggest of which includes the open and sometimes vast consumption of alcohol. It allows people 
not affiliated with our culture a cloud cover to hide behind, and that's getting wildly drunk and/or obnoxious in public without censure, but that's only part of it for us. 

The "pub" is an institution: part community center ("pub", as in a public house that's serves the community), part stage for the art of storytelling that's enhanced with a pint or two, part musician's venue, part restaurant, part psychiatrist's office, part meeting room, part boarding house, part illicit den...in short, it's woven into our culture in many, many different ways, and there's alcohol served as well. 

But, outsiders don't always get those parts, so we tend to stay away from rank amateur hours like the big city parade (that's for tourists!), as we steer our kiddies towards safer havens, like a small town parade. Ours is a bit repetitive and boring, and it sure brings out the loud, nasty drunk who's brazen enough to do it in public for the whole town to see, around children, and under a noonday sun, but that's part of who we are, too. I don't turn away from the bad stuff, and neither should you. We're adults. We can handle it.

Party skills are essential, especially when open container laws are in effect.

Someone's getting the parade "feel"! That's me in the hat and sunglasses.

My café table and aggressor: kids bumped into it and it fell onto my foot.

Tutus from the toy store proprietress in town are always a favorite.

"Hey, I want some popcorn, too!" said the St. Bernard to his new friend.

The Polar Bear Princess wore a tiara over her hat!

Honoring our vets, one pin at a time.

Lots of other geegaws on sale, too.

Nice coat! I love the "Dogs on Parade" part the best.

Our parade always begins with New York's Finest at the lead.

It's not all good looks and glamour: sometimes ya gotta shovel it.

Pomp and circumstance, with music and color. Alright!

Hey, man! Whassup?! Is he walking on stilts?

You know you're good when you can play without hands.

These horses are huge! The sorrel-colored horse is spectacular.

Cute, but the bands' awful. Oh well. Pearl River Pirates are great wrestlers!

North Rockland had the best school band, I thought. Great outfits, too.

No way?! "G.I. Joe with the Kung-Fu Grip" is here! Awesome!

Representing Boston. They took  the "Most Snowfall" category this year.

Big crowd this year, and getting bigger every year.

Soccer kids! They were fun and energetic, also starting a tradition young.

Kids love the parade. They wear costumes and special Irish outfits!

Lots of flash and razzle-dazzle. It's a show, after all!

Adults watching in the shadows, taking it all in.

The party ends with a big dump truck for all the garbage. Reality sets in.

A Gladiator, or two, or three hundred or more, thrown into the mix.

Real heroes with red fire trucks are always welcome at the house on the hill.