Category Archives: Family Story

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I remember going down to Rush Street on St. Patrick’s Day wearing a big “Kiss me I’m Irish” button hoping to get lucky. St Patrick’s Day was a time to party and sing Irish songs and look for a good time, but it is so much more. All the bars were crowded. The ones I remember were “Pat Harans”,”Mothers” and some vague Irish looking pubs. It was a great time and I looked forward to it every year.–that was a while ago.

This past weekend was the annual St Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago. It was also the weekend we spent in the city. It seemed much crazier than when I was in college. There were more people and many had painted themselves green or decorated themselves in some wild manner. There were pop-up vendors selling hats and green beads. Our Pakistani taxi driver told us that he expected to have a very long and crazy night with all the drunks.

I’ve always had this ambivalence about being Irish. My grandparents are from Ireland. They emigrated in 1902 and raised their family on the south side of Chicago. There was always a difference between south side Irish and north side Irish. The north siders were always better off while the south siders were more laborers and tradesmen. They worked in the stockyards and the steel foundries. They were also extremely prejudiced and there was much anger towards black people. They saw them taking over their neighborhoods and their jobs.

As I grew up the N word was used frequently by my relatives. They began leaving the city and moving to the suburbs but they took their prejudice with them. I saw myself as so much better because of my education and liberal hippie ways, but I didn’t have their responsibilities or their worries. I began telling my friends about the tribal ways of the south side Irish. I would make fun of their mispronunciations and peculiar worldview.

As I got older my Irish heritage became more important. I wondered why my grandparents came here. In 2014 we were fortunate enough to visit Ireland and some things became clearer. We even visited the town my grandparents came from. We were able to talk to one of the town historians and he told us of the incredible poverty of that time. There was also a real persecution by the English. Apparently the IRA burned down the police station in their town in retaliation for some action. We saw the sculptures commemorating the famine from the mid 19^th century. The more I saw the more I understood why they came here. I began to get angry at the English for starving my relatives and taking advantage of them for centuries.

Now I was proud of being Irish and would tell my own sons the importance of their heritage. In the early 1980s my wife’s brother was dating an Irish girl from the south side. They would spend all their weekends in these south side Irish bars. In each one there would be a collection box to help the Irish poor. The collections really were another way to fund the IRA because Chicago was one of their main financial hubs. The “troubles” in Ireland took thousands of lives and there are now concerns that it is starting again. I suppose it is easy for me as a 2nd generation American to be critical of people dressing in green paint and getting drunk and hoping for a hook up. I suppose it is also easy for me to be overly critical of the way England and Ireland have managed their struggles over the last four hundred years. The older I get the more I realize that there are no easy answers and the more I judge others the more I have to realize that I haven’t walked in their shoes or faced their lives. So Erin Go Bragh and the part of me that’s Irish will always be conflicted about what that really means.

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So today we begin taking down the decorations. I have always had a difficult time with this. It means the season really is over. Since I was very young this has always been a very special magical time for me. I think it probably came from my parents. My Mom and Dad always made Christmas a big deal. My Dad’s parents were dead before my sisters and I were really aware of them and my Mom’s mother was pretty old when we were growing up. My parents had lived thru the depression and my dad made it thru WWII in the Pacific, so when they could, they always made the holiday special for us. I think I believed in Santa Claus until I was in 3^rd, or maybe even 4rth grade. When my mother told me I didn’t believe her. I still wanted the magic.

My wife and I always tried to make Christmas special for our kids. They really had just us. My parents and my wife’s mother were dead. Her father had remarried and was much more focused on his own life than his grandchildren. I don’t think this was much different than a lot of other people our age, The National Lampoon “Christmas Vacation” movie would always get brought up by our kids as symbolic of our generation. I guess it was.

November was always the month I dreaded. The grey rainy cold days seemed to go on forever. I would get up in the dark and come home in the dark and couldn’t wait to go to sleep. Then miraculously Thanksgiving would come and the world changed. Sleep was no longer important and I really wouldn’t sleep well until mid January.

Suddenly I began to think about putting up outside lights and decorations. When we first moved into our home, our next door neighbor and I would have a contest to see who could get the lights up first. This somewhat stopped when he ran off with his secretary, but I still put lights up. I always wanted one of those blow-up inflatable creatures to put on the front lawn, but my wife always over ruled me. She would always get a little nervous when I got the lights out and worried that I would fall off a ladder, be electrocuted, or bankrupt us with my elaborate plans.

After the lights were up it was time to begin shopping. I hate shopping!!! The Internet has been a godsend, but in the old days you actually had to go into the stores. Homeland Security could use Toys-R-Us as an interrogation center. It gets crazier as the season progresses. The craziest thing I ever saw didn’t happen in Toys-R-Us, but in Best Buy. My sons wanted a new game console. I think it was the Sega system. It was a very hot toy that Christmas and all the stores were out. Best Buy put out an ad that they had a limited amount and would sell first come, first serve. Their store would open at 8:00AM and I got there at 6:00. There were already 15-20 people there before me. We all waited until the store opened and then made a mad dash for the games. I was able to get one, but there was a mob scene behind me. I heard a yell and looked around just as a large black woman slugged a woman who had gotten the last Sega. The police had to be called and I thankfully got out of there with my prize before there were any more problems.

Another of my shopping adventures involved shopping for my wife. Most husbands have difficulty with this. If you go to any of the malls between 12/23-12/24, you will see many guys walking around with kind of a dazed panic look on their faces. One year my wife said she wanted some comfortable sweat pants. I shopped and shopped and thought I had finally found just the right pair for her. She opened the gift and said that of course they would be comfortable since they were maternity sweats, but since she had had a hysterectomy a year before she didn’t think she would wear them. Since then I have always tried to buy her something shiny for Christmas. It also now helps that she gives me a rather specific list.

The food at Christmas is also a problem. Every family has food traditions. Ours usually involved 20 lbs of sugar. I think some of the mood swings that occur at the end of Christmas are related to sugar withdrawal. I try to make everything last as long as possible. I have even been known to hide Christmas candy until St. Patrick’s Day. Since my sons have grown and left you would think this would stop, but my manic behavior continues. I would always rationalize my behavior by thinking that this could be the last Christmas. This probably came from the relatively early death of my parents, or maybe I just never really grew up and Christmas is one of the times I can still be a child who still believes in Santa Claus. I still see the benefit in this. I now see the same look in my 4 y/o grandson’s eyes. A sense of wonder and magic is one of the ways we become aware of the beauty of life. As this season ends I will put away my childish things, but I will keep holding on to my childish ways—

Merry Christmas

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Easter!! Rebirth!! Spring and Easter Egg hunts! This Sunday my sister had an Easter Egg hunt for her grandchildren and our grandson. It was absolute chaos with the little ones running around trying to get the eggs and eat the candy inside before their parents caught them. The children were all beautiful, charming, funny and wonderful. I think my own parents would have loved to be there. I still hear my mother’s laugh sometimes.
Ever wonder why when you least expect it, you hear one of your parent’s words coming out of your mouth? Maybe even think beyond that and wonder if it’s your parent’s words or their parents. Families are such organic entities. We not only share genes, appearance, personality, but also strange mixtures of all of the above. Anytime we have a family gathering I think of that. I see my own sons, my grandson, my nieces, nephew, and their children and begin to see all the various connections. Whenever a baby is born a female relative, (rarely a male), will begin this by saying. “He looks just like his mother, father, sister, grandfather etc”. The connections begin.
Then families begin imparting values, language, beliefs and everything else.
Sometimes families can pass on qualities and values that are not very positive. This can open them up to severe criticism from others who simply don’t understand where that has come from. My maternal grandparents emigrated from County Cork in Ireland in 1902. The reason they came is still somewhat mysterious. My grandfather was the oldest son of a farmer. Supposedly the farm would have been his, but Ireland at that time was suffering from overwhelming poverty. County Cork was also the site of much political turmoil due to still being under English rule. It is uncertain if they came to better themselves or to escape. He and my grandmother also sponsored a number of their relatives from Ireland so they could emigrate.

My grandfather’s trade was listed as a blacksmith. Now this was in the beginning of the 20th century. Automobiles were soon to become regular means of transportation and blacksmiths were not needed as much. They had six children. Five survived. Their oldest son died as a child from heart disease due to complications from scarlet or rheumatic fever. They were able to buy a brick 2 flat on the south side of Chicago. They could augment their income by renting one of the apartments. They survived the great depression and were able to keep their house. My grandmother was supposedly a very good financial manager. She had to be. My grandfather had a number of different jobs in factories and as a watchman. He may have had a drinking problem. He certainly had some difficulty adjusting to the complexities of modern life. My grandparents depended on money from their older children to survive. Thus was due to my grandfather’s difficulty in keeping jobs and also to the economy of the times. They never saw any of their children get married and may have tried to prevent all of the marriages because of their growing financial dependence on their children.
In the post war period neighborhoods began to “change”. This meant that black families were trying to improve themselves by moving to nicer areas. There were “Blockbusters”. This usually meant the first black family to move into an area. This caused much conflict. Neighborhoods were strictly divided in those days into Irish, Polish, and Italian areas. There was concern that black families would not just take over the neighborhood, but also take over the few jobs available then. In the late 1940s this happened in my grandparents neighborhood. My grandfather had stopped working by that time. He was probably 70-71 years old. There was a riot due to a black family moving in. The police had to be called to control it. My grandfather went to see what was going on. He saw the police struggling with a young friend of his. He tried to intervene and was arrested himself. He was in jail at least overnight. This was devastating to him. He had his first heart attack shortly thereafter and was dead within six months.
Due to this and the circumstances of the times, the whole family had a strong prejudice against black people. The family moved and became part of the “white flight” from the city to surrounding suburbs. The “N” word was used frequently. Not only had our grandfather died, but we also all had to move out of our comfortable environments. This was the way we grew up. It took a lot to change. There was family resistance to that change and some family members still hold on to the old ways.
Our generation went thru all of the civil rights movements, assassinations, Vietnam, to struggle to make some progress. Our children are now often colorblind and can’t understand how anyone can have prejudice because of the color of someone’s skin, religion or their sexual orientation. There are obviously still remnants of these old beliefs and values in certain areas and groups, but there is progress. I am proud of both of my sons and their partners in the beliefs they all have. I see them being passed to my grandson. Someday he will certainly wonder where a certain phrase came from, but he hopefully won’t have to deal with some of the more negative values his grandparents dealt with.