Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! This is my second favorite holiday (New Year's being the first) for two reasons: because I am 1/4 Irish and because today is my half-birthday. Actually, three reasons, also because today is my best friend's birthday. Her name is Patricia and she is a terrific flamenco dancer whom I've known since I cast her in a student film at USC in 1979.
Today is my half-birthday because I was exactly six months old on March 17th and my grandfather, Paddy, thought that made me the luckiest child on the planet. My family, loving a good reason to celebrate, had a party to commemorate it. After that, they probably would have forgotten about it except two years later my brother was born and exactly six months to the day his half-birthday fell on Valentine's Day. That cinched it. For every year on my half-birthday they would present me with half a cake and one present. My cake would either say, "Hap...Birth...Ka" or "py...day...te!" I only can recall now one of the presents I received. It was a red stick horse with white trim when I was six. I remember opening my mother's closet door and there it was, leaning against the corner. I loved that stick horse. I rode it everywhere until it was ragged. St. Patrick's Day is the perfect day for me to be half a year as I am a jubilant person who tends to be happy in spite of anything with most definitely a gift for the good story. Or rather, I should let you be the judge of that.
My brother Brian would appropriately get his half a cake and present every Valentine's Day. It was such a terrific tradition in our family, the best part being that one doesn't get older on one's half-birthday, that Brian and I have kept up the tradition ever since. This past Valentine's Day I sent him a CD I made of photos of our summer vacation last summer as a present (we drove seven thousand miles last summer across the country and back). A couple of days ago, he sent me a present via Pay Pal and I bought with it business cards to give out about this blog.
It is a good idea to celebrate whenever you can. I come from a town in the San Francisco Bay Area called Benicia, an old settlement that covered a small flat area by the edge of the bay, at least that was true before the huge wave of immigrants from the Midwest flooded in in the '80's to purchase and inhabit a swath of cheaply-built but very expensive, ostentaciously bland track homes covering the hills above the old town, hills that used to be lovely wild grassland for miles and miles. When I was in high school, a friend hiking out in those hills on a search for brown bats found for some inexplicable reason a perfectly working old black Singer sewing machine covered in paintings of roses sitting right in the middle of an open field. He gave it to me and I still have it. I used it a couple of months ago to sew the kitchen curtains in this house where I live. But sadly the Midwesterners who moved into the track homes above the old town brought with them their Midwestern work ethic, their vivid desire for large loads of money and their corrective behavior. I say sadly because when they came they changed an old California town with its own uniquely long-developed personality into a carbon copy of any other mind-numbing yuppie grid of Barbie dreamhouses. Before they came, our town was nearly entirely Irish and Portuguese from way back, mostly from the Gold Rush or Prohibition. In fact, it was Benicia where the guy famously got drunk and blurted he had found gold at Sutter's Mill, causing the Gold Rush to begin. The entire main street was originally saloons and bordellos so that the antique stores that followed were actually bordellos with a lot of great furniture from the Far East, brought to the girls by appreciative sailors. And in a lot of the basements along the old main street still are speak-easies hidden since and during the 1920's with walled up tunnels that ran under the street.
Those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in Benicia before the bedroom community on the hills are now called Old Timers. We prefer the old part of town, which is on the flatland between the old arsenal and the swamp (excuse me, I mean the State Park), running up to the bay, the Benicia we "know". We prefer the old, perhaps somewhat lazy but good good lifestyle we led before the others arrived, where our houses were a bit dilapidated and where we sat around at our local coffeehouse to talk philosophy, soak up coffee and play chess and music and read poetry aloud. One of our best mayors was a poet. My mother was a poet. She would wear a bright red shawl I got her in Scotland, pinned at the shoulder with a huge silver brooch. She would read her poetry aloud with flare, often tears streaming down her eyes in punctuation.
I mean, after all, what does "a good standard of living" really mean? Does it really mean to work constantly and compete with the Joneses and force your kids to be very short clones of track home adults, unimaginative, humorless and obsessively ambitious? I once took care of a couple of kids up there in the bedroom community on the hill. The boy was eight years old. He was a smart, enthused kid who would tell me innumerable facts about military history so one day I told him that when he grew up he might consider being a military historian because he had a real talent for it. I said it just to make him feel good about himself. A few days later he told me that he had decided not to be a military historian when he grew up. I smiled to myself and asked why. He replied, "Because they only pull down fifty thou." For me, that says it all. When at home, I avoid that part of town if possible.
In contrast, they used to say in Benicia when it was still just the old town that if you didn't have an Irish last name it was because it was your mother who was Irish. This of course was true for me, my mom's last name being O'Reilly. The Irish in town tended not to actually go to church but the Portuguese did and very often on Sundays suddenly there would appear a parade down the main street, usually with small Portuguese girls dressed in elaborate gowns celebrating yet another saint's day. The Irish were the audience, as always sitting around on the sidewalk outside the coffeehouses, as the strange pretty parade would soberly glide past.
One year when I was a teenager or so, I was walking up the street. I saw some guys I had known most of my life sitting by a cafe talking. As I neared I glanced into a newspaper machine. I fumbled for some coins and bought a paper. Rushing up to my Irish friends, I said, "Did you see the news! They caught a wanted IRA guy who was living incognito around here for years!" One of them turned towards me and said, "I don't know anything about it." I said look, look, it's in the paper! He grinned and replied, "I don't know anything about it."
Back then it was said there were five hundred garage bands in town and I believe it. Everybody seemed to be able to play something or at least sing. The owner of one of the coffeehouses' brother had been lead guitarist for David Crosby's band. His name was Carl and the young would-be guitarists would flock around him every day to talk about music. My brother was a professional trumpet player and one day the owner of the coffeehouse asked Carl and my brother if they would play a benefit for his place because he really needed to earn a bit more money. They said sure and showed up the highly advertised day. The coffeehouse was packed and my brother, Brian, and Carl got up to play. After a long session that was terrific, they sat down at my table for a break. My brother turned to me and slightly whispering said, "Guess what. Carl and I don't know a single song that the other one knows." I couldn't believe it. We in the room all thought they had sounded terrific. Brian said, "We didn't practice once; we just figured we'd show up and we'd know plenty the other one knew. But Carl's rock and I'm jazz!" He started laughing. "Man," I said, "one person told me you sounded like Miles Davis." "Cool," he said, still laughing.
Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! Have a pint and talk a bit of the blarney, hang out in a cafe all day watching the parades go by. Go out and look at the budding green of the wild grasses. Have a wonderful day.
