17 March 2006

Luck o' the Irish

My grandfather Mike was the last full-blooded Irishman in the family, and his grandfather may have been the first of the family to land on these shores, leaving the forty shades o' green behind, or the fields that still grew the wheat to make bread for the English table, even as the potatoes took the rot and died.

He chose to ride his luck across the waves, and here is where he made it, swinging a hammer on the Alexandria railroad, and later guiding a team of horses for the Union Army.

If anyone was still angry about his luck, it would have been Mike, the last of the line. He had his causes, he did, though that side of the family seemed eager enough to take up the musket. His great uncle, another refugee from the Famine, fought to take Tennessee out of the Union, just as his grandfather had fought to keep Ohio in.

My mother carried half of his Irish blood, and I half of that.

My kids are thus a half of a half of a half, and so the Diaspora from the Emerald Isle melts into the muddle of North America.

It is St. Patrick's Day, and in Chicago they will dye the river green. We are all Irish today, on the feast-day devoted to a Welsh-Roman patrician, who through mischance, found himself as a Shepard-slave to an Irish Druid.

There is more to his story, of course, but there is little time for it. The secular holiday here has already begun, and dye has been injected into kegs and some have risen early to start the day with a beer.

I have some work to accomplish today, and intend to be at my desk on time, or near to it. But I have not observed St. Patrick's Day in a long time, and may indulge it, if I have the wit to slip away around lunchtime.

I have been thinking about making a foray on the subway to the Dubliner, the Irish bastion in the city that kept its doors open by Union Station when the rest of the city shut down and boarded itself up.

I first walked into the dark wood bar in the Phoenix Park Hotel almost thirty years ago, when a trip to Washington was exotic. A cab was the only way to get there after dark. The vast bulk of Union Station was boarded up, with only plywood alleys to lead to the tracks. The long bulk of the Post Office across the street was the color of old bone, and predators stalked the streets within the shadow of the Senate side of the Capitol dome.

The Guinness was dark and fresh inside the Dubliner though, and the lights warm and welcoming. The boys behind the bar were the real thing, and if they were just here cooling off from The Troubles, the IRA still had a certain romantic nostalgia. We did not know they had become Marxist thugs.

Tip O'Neil and president Reagan both hoisted a pint at the Dubliner in their day, until dark rumors swirled that rockets and worse might be stored in the Dubliner's dank basement. The President moved his annual pint across the river, to Ireland's Own in Alexandria, where you can still see a plate and napkin he used preserved under glass.

Now that the Troubles are over, it is probably safe to go back to the Dubliner, though it is likely to be awfully crowded today.

There is a Grill located diagonally from the Bus Depot. It is brand spanking new, and open to serve the burgeoning population of bourgeois business people who inhabit the new towers that are marching toward U Street to the north.

The other morning, gazing from the roof of the Bus Station, I counted no less than fourteen construction cranes towering above the arc of the frontier that stretches from SE to NE in the District

The brass letters on the building announce that it is Bobby Van's Steakhouse. I thought perhaps it was named for the minor entertainer of the '50s, whose greatest film was the Mamie Van Dorn vehicle “The Navy Versus the Night Monsters.”

It isn't. I checked the company, and the steakhouse is a franchise spun off from an original restaurant in New York, named for the piano player, and a watering hole of Truman Capote.

As a veteran, that changed my initial impression. I am naturally inclined to support Mamie's heroic bosom and my old service against monsters, of which I understand Capote to have been a small specimen. But I also heard the food was good.

One of our hardy office mates took a government official to lunch there just as it opened, carefully splitting the tab as things are done here these days.

The report was that the staff was from Ireland, and even more surprising, the ownership was, too. Being new, management was hovering around the registers, ensuring that everything went according to the business plan and the customers were happy. This was Irish management with the gold Rolex wristwatch, and golden chains and cufflinks.

The Luck seems to have changed. It is not the Ireland I remember from the family stories, which had no gold in them at all, except the plating on a watch at the end of a railroad career.

This being a new millennium, if I can sneak away at lunch, I might just go across the street and talk to some real Irishmen. There is only the one homeless man who guards the median of New York Avenue to get by.

On this particular day, it would be nice to see part of the extended family that is doing well.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra .com

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