A Royal Christmas

Deck the halls and all that, here’s another clip from QI:

Old Haunts

Yesterday, my wife posted a screen shot of the house she grew up in on her blog, and, being a gentleman, I promptly snitched her idea and got a screen shot of one of my childhood homes.

The adjacent image shows the place my family lived in for most of the late ’60s in San Francisco. My aunt and uncle bought the place in 1965, and all seven of us–my aunt and uncle, my parents, my two brothers, and me–lived on the first floor. The exterior was stucco and orange in those days, and we lived there until 1970. That is except for the 1966-1967 school year, when we lived on 36th Avenue because of a falling out my father had with my uncle.

I broke my collarbone in that front room, the one just barely visible through the turret. There were never any plants in that room then, just me, some French Provincial furniture, and my best friend, the TV. It happened one summer afternoon in 1968. I was in that front room with my brother Rick and a friend of his named Danny. Danny had a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, which is about as close to being a Communist as I ever got. The room was actually a double parlor that had been cleaved in twain by some folding doors to turn it into a bedroom for my parents and a living room. On this day, however, the doors were opened and the two rooms stretched into one long, sunny space.

For some reason that had nothing to do with Chairman Mao, my brother and his friend decided to make some paper airplanes. Since they were about 14 at the time there is nothing unusual about this. They started throwing them from what had been my parent’s bedroom into the living room portion to see what kind of distances they could get, and I started running after the airplanes, trying to catch them like a wide receiver. One plane glided just a bit past my reach, and I dove for it. It would appear that diving for it was a bit of a mistake because I missed the plane and landed with a thud.

I know I knew I was hurt, but my instinct then–and perhaps even now–was to just keep my mouth shut and to hope that things would work out on their own. I don’t actually remember my brother’s response, but I would expect that he rushed to me to make sure I was okay. I can’t imagine him doing anything else. However, at 14, I doubt that his medical expertise extended to diagnosing simple fractures of the clavicle, and his desire to not get in trouble certainly added to his optimism that I would be fine in a little bit. I would have to be. He wouldn’t have wanted to even contemplate the idea that he had somehow broken his little brother.

A couple of hours later, when it was time to leave to go someplace, my parents found me sitting on the front steps trying to tie my shoes one-handed. I told them that I had tripped on my untied shoelace while running–just one of the many brilliant lies I told while growing up. They inserted the standard lecture on untied shoes and took me to the emergency room for x-rays. My left arm ended up in a sling for eight weeks, coming off in time for the new school year. I can still remember the sensation of having my left arm in that sling, still feel it in my muscles and tendons.

Even as I recall these things, I cannot be certain of many of the details. I can’t remember for certain whether these things happened that summer or the one before, whether there was furniture in the room or none. I can’t remember whether my parents found me on as we were leaving to return to 36th Avenue or whether there was some other reason why they came out the front door. (My Dad parked the Rambler in the garage, which you can just barely see behind the windshield of the car in the photo, just under the turret. They usually went down the back stairs to the garage and got in the car down there.) It is a strange and wonderful and elusive thing, memory. We rummage through it like an old closet, trying to figure out what went wrong and what went right in our lives. And yet the facts are like images carved in steam. You can reach at them and through them, but can never quite grasp them or study them as you would a dead frog or ancient Greek.

Sometimes all you have are places. Places to ponder and details to remember. What comes back is the sensation of the bend of your arm as it sat in a sling or the smell of the curry cooking down the hall or the taste of a madeleine.

The Irish in America

I am, for all intents and purposes, half Irish. (There is a well-worn legend in my family that my great-grandmother used to say, “I have some English blood in me, and if I knew which vein it was in, I’d open it up and let it out.”) Every St. Patrick’s Day, I tend to meditate on that part of my heritage. I’m sure that this is due, mostly, to the aura of publicity that surrounds St. Patrick’s Day. St. Joseph’s Day comes around on March 19th, and I never spend any time on that day considering the implications of being part Italian. And I don’t even know what day you’re supposed to think about being of French Canadian descent. And what would you do anyway? Eat crepes and sing “Frere Jacques”?

But back to being Irish. Or, rather, half Irish. Or, rather, being descended from a bunch of people who were born in Ireland back in the 19th Century or before. For that is the point here. I am not Irish. I am an American who happens to be related to people who live in Ireland, people I have never met because they would be descendants of my grandfather’s cousins at closest. On my grandmother’s side, I’ve discovered that her Irish forebears came to the United States in the 1840s via Nova Scotia. (I have no idea why Nova Scotia. I guess it was a shorter swim from the Old Sod.)

Part of the allure of my Irish heritage comes from the romance of it. Being Irish, in America, is somewhat akin to being a fan of the Red Sox or Cubs. The emphasis that Irish-Americans tend to make is with struggle and oppression, and the Irish as a people are cast as the endless underdog, a nation of Davids just waiting for the chance to slay a Goliath or two. The trouble with this identification is that it flies in the face of reality.

Although oppressed by the Brits and discriminated against by WASPish America in the past, the Irish are currently one of the great success stories of European culture. The Republic has grown prosperous enough to have its own housing bubble. Irish-Americans have done rather well for themselves over the years. According to Wikipedia, “After 1945, the Catholic Irish consistently ranked toward the top of the social hierarchy, thanks especially to their high rate of college attendance.” Even Northern Ireland, long embattled and worn down from strife, has seen a rise in high tech manufacturing as The Troubles have subsided.

The Irish in America have a complicated relationship with the mother country. Identification with one’s Irish heritage is often passionate and fierce, even though Irish-Americans tend to shy away from public physical displays of affection and tend to bottle up as many emotions other than anger, derision, and humor that they can. The modern IRA was dependent on Irish-Americans to fund and arm it, enablers in a dysfunctional relationship. My parents used to occasionally lunch at an Irish pub in North Kingstown, RI, where patrons would, from time-to-time, rise, place their hands over their hearts, and sing “A United Ireland Again.” (The character of Paul’s Grandfather sings a snippet of it in the film A Hard Day’s Night.) I’ve known people who belonged to an organization called Ireland’s 32 and whose cars bore bumper stickers that read, “26+6=1.” (There are traditionally 32 counties in Ireland, 26 in the Republic and 6 in Northern Ireland.)

I think that fewer Irish-Americans go in for that these days, although, since I now live in the deep South rather than in Rhode Island (the most Irish state in the Union), I have less exposure to that crowd. Still, the IRA has been largely eclipsed by Sinn Fein, and I’m sure more people are singing and clapping along to “The Wild Rover” than “A United Ireland Again.” Irish literature has become a big business in academic circles and James Joyce and W.B. Yeats have been installed as titans of 20th Century literature, although I suspect that there are more people who are familiar with Riverdance than riverrun.

Still, today is the day on which I’m am supposed to celebrate my Irishness, so I guess I will do my part. I’m wearing green, which is a fairly recent innovation on my part. I used to just, when asked, point at the veins on my wrist and say “It’s in there.” I must be mellowing with old age. I will, however, pick up a bottle of whiskey on the way home and perhaps run through a chorus of “The Wild Rover” on the guitar before bed.

And it’s no–nay–never
(clap-clap-clap-clap)
No, nay, never, no more
Will I play The Wild Rover
No, never, no more.

Sláinte!

Football

My wife, yesterday, made an offer that many men would consider ideal. She suggested that next year I should watch more football with my son. The Super Bowl was on, and she took note of the intensity with which I watched the game and understood that my son was interested in learning more about it and felt that watching football would be a good bonding experience for the two of us. All of which is fair enough.

I haven’t really watched much football in many years, though. I drifted away from it over time and for a variety of reasons. I acquired other interests. I was put off by the endless posturing of the modern professional football player. Mostly, I stayed away from it not because I cared too little, though. I stayed away from it because I cared too much, and it seemed pointless to expend that much emotion and energy on the outcome of a game.

I grew up a 49ers fan, and before the dynasty of the ’80s and early ’90s the Niners had one brief flirtation with success. It was in the early ’70s when they won three division crowns in a row. Their success was founded on a first-rate offensive line. They set a record for fewest sacks allowed in 1972 and having that kind of protection gave John Brodie the chance to show how fine a quarterback he really was.

In 1972, it seemed like a trip to the Super Bowl was theirs for the having when they went into the 4th quarter of the championship game against the Dallas Cowboys up 28-13. A young quarterback from the Naval Academy in Annapolis named Roger Staubach came in for the Cowboys and engineered three drives–two with less than two minutes on the clock–to defeat the 49ers and to doom them to another near decade of struggle.

It was a terrible and exciting game, and after it, my father announced that he never wanted to go through that emotional roller coaster just for the sake of a football game again. He never watched another game.

All of which brings me to Super Bowl XLII.

I have followed the Patriots ever since we moved back to Rhode Island from San Francisco in 1970. In any match up of the two teams, I would pull for the Niners. Other than that, I am a Patriots fan. Last night’s game–for those of us on the losing side–was another of those “that’s it, I’ll never watch another of those games” games. A few thoughts:

The MVP should not have been Eli Manning. It should have been David Tyree. He made a series of catches–most memorably the one where he clutched the ball to his helmet with one hand as he was tackled–when the rest of the Giant offense was doing bupkiss. He played phenomenally well and should have been rewarded.

Bill Belichick’s decision to go on 4th down instead of trying for a field goal in the third quarter was the key play of the game. It was a reckless, foolish decision, strategically unsupportable and completely needless. Had they gotten the field goal, even with the last minute heroics, you end up with a tie and overtime. It was grandstanding and the result of having suffered too much success.

The Patriots’ coaching staff can also be faulted for not changing over to a short yardage passing game until the 4th quarter. It was obvious by the end of the 1st quarter that they needed to offset and use the Giants’ ferocious pass rush with screens and passes to the flat mixed in with draw plays and periodic mid-range passes up the middle. They are a team that is perfectly constituted for a classic Bill Walsh offense, and they are morons if they don’t institute such an offense next season.

Not that I care, mind you. After all, it’s only a game.