Those are my boys, Unorganized Hancock, back in the day. They’re old enough to drink now, which must make it easier to pretend to like me at family gatherings. They’re still wishing you and yours a modestly amusing generic Christmas.
And the monkey chased the weasel ’round the flagpole.
Not really. I’d have loved to see marching bands in uniforms, desecrating some Sousa while trying to remember straw foot, hay foot, but it was not to be. No matter. It was a very Maine parade. The Augusta July 4th just passed by my window, and refreshed my opinion of my fellow man a bit, even if they couldn’t hunt up any baton twirlers.
Since we’re living the vida loca in the city, we get certain perqs to go along with the lack of peace and quiet. We were smack dab on the parade route. I got to sit on my couch and watch it roll by. I was expecting a perfunctory affair, but it took a full hour to traipse past me and my cup of coffee. It was gratifying to see the street lined with families to see the parade. Children are, after all, humanity’s opinion that life should go on. There were lots of them along the sidewalk under our windows, doing toddler things and generally wearing out their parents in amusing ways.
The parades of my youth are long gone. I think that’s because parades used to be more crypto-military. It was never one of those soviet things with missiles rolling by a bandstand filled with guys about to get airbrushed out of photos or anything, but the vague outlines of the military were always there. Uniforms, marching in step, playing martial music, and waving flags. The pennants of the various marching groups were like battalion identifiers in the army. But that was because our parents generation still had world wars and police actions on their resumes. It was familiar to anyone who had marched in step, but completely devoid of any menace. The military used to be general. Now it’s niche.
So the parade was more like a giant, charming paramecium blobbing its way down the main drag than phalanxes on the march. It consisted of quite the agglomeration of the local gentry, and a heaping helping of just plain stuff, somewhat festooned with bunting and flags, and suitable for waving from, and waving at.
I don’t keep up with the Marvel Comics scene, but even to my eye, Captain America has let himself go a bit.
It was pleasant that the parade hadn’t devolved entirely into off-topic scene-stealing by the usual suspects. Here’s a nice bunch of folks on their way to sew flags or shoot a redcoat from behind a tree or sign a document in florid cursive.
I’ve performed in Fourth of July parades, and been dragged through the streets on a giant flatbed trailer, so I won’t make any mordant remarks about marching bands that don’t march.
The various dance studios from the area made appearances, and the gaggles of young girls certainly added to the festive and un-martial air of the proceedings. Here’s one set, performing their patented synchronized handstand maneuver, which was synchronized about as well as a helicopter evacuation from a fallen ally’s roof, but much more charming.
Holy cow, Shriners! They had Shriners like Nigeria has princes. They came in drove after drove, and drove little motorcycles in figure eights like madmen. They had oversized gas-powered big wheels, and drifted in crazy loops. Then there were little NASCAR wildmen bombing around, and even spicing things up by occasionally turning right, too. I have no idea how I got tilt-shift to happen on my wife’s phone, but I did:
The Shriners had an awesome bunch of antique cars and trucks, too.
You’re officially old when cars you once rode in while new are currently antiques. Dad! He’s looking at me!
After the legions of Shriners wore us out with their frivolity, some regular old commerce reared its head a little. It’s very Maine, though, to parade things like logging trucks. The little boys wander out to the edge of the parking lane, and make the international mime motion for yanking down on a cable, and the drivers cooperate nicely and blow their air horns. And honestly, is it really an Independence Day celebration until someone cruises by towing a Japanese excavator? I think not.
The parade lasted over an hour. it finished up with every fire engine from five towns around filing majestically in a line, and sending the toddlers behind moms’ skirts with their sirens. Lots of people threw candy to the kids, and someone even had a trolley full of free children’s books they handed out as they passed along the route. I noticed them on the way back, completely wiped out of books.
And this being Maine, when it was all over, and everyone had gone home to get properly sunburned and full of hot dogs and craft beer, there wasn’t so much as a candy wrapper left along the parade route.
When I was little my father took me to the graves on Memorial Day.
He was a younger man than I am now. He’d drag any of us he could catch all over the Boston landscape to one boneyard after another. Memorial Day wasn’t just for the military dead for him. It was some sort of druidical day. Touch the stone. Pull the weeds. Say the words. Explain to your son who that person was and what they meant to him. Then off to look for the next stone marker by the next oak in the next town. I never understood it. To me it seemed like the stone was all there was to them.
He was a veteran. Everyone was, once. Army Air Force in World War II. He hung below a B24 in a little glass ball and watched the Pacific and the Zeros pass by. He never spoke of it, really, until he was dying in front of me.
I don’t know if he knew he was dying. I don’t know if you look that visitor in the face, ever. Humans don’t seem capable of dealing with the idea. If you’re 114, I imagine you figure you’ll die tomorrow. But not today. Never today. You know you’re dying when you’re 10, too. You file that knowledge away with the things that live in the back of the closet and out by the woodpile on a moonless night.
Towards the end, I took him to the doctors a lot. His body wasn’t sick. It was a villain, an enemy at that point. It didn’t let him down; it turned on him. But I’d take him to the doctor just the same — who seemed more in tune with the wraith of endless malady that shared my father’s body than my father himself. They took turns working on him like a heavy bag. I’m not sure which showed more mercy. Doctors have precious little mercy in them, in my experience. It’s not in their job description, anyway. I don’t understand why people look for it from them.
I had almost nothing to do with my father for about 15 years or so. He was lost to me, or I was lost to him, or something. I got the feeling towards the end there that I was of some small use to him, and I liked it. I took him and sat with him while we waited on chairs that would make you feeble if you weren’t already, then afterwards we ate a donut and drank coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts while gaping like shut-ins at the traffic passing by. He lost all his teeth when he was a child, and had a soft spot, always, for a jelly donut.
It’s hard to describe what came out of his mouth while we lingered there on those afternoons. I’m not sure he was talking to me. He was unraveling a long string, and allowed me to sit with him as he did it. The string wasn’t coherent. It was all one skein, but it was bits and pieces of things, knotted together roughly, all out of order, but all of immense interest to me. I think the Rosetta Stone has mundane things written on it, doesn’t it? What’s mundane… depends.
All these people appeared among the clatter of the cash registers and the muffled sound of the traffic outside, suspended in fleeting words in the air in front of his eyes, eyes gone the color of dishwater from their blue beginnings. He produced laundry lists of my flesh and blood; himself when he was younger, described like any other stranger; far-flung relatives; friends gone but not forgotten. They assembled as he called them up in an imaginary mob behind him until there were too many to count. He was their priest, or maybe their Ouija board, their lawyer, their mourner, raiding their tombs like Carnarvon.
And nothing passed their lips but a terrible murmur that my father could not hear: Why the world would give them a stone when all they asked for was bread.
So yesterday was a serious holiday here in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. Lots of stores and restaurants were closed all day. We went to the zocalo, the big, main square, and malingered in the shade. The stores and the park were filled with children, because school’s out, yo. We had to cancel a dinner excursion with new friends because the restaurant would be closed to observe the day, properly, like we used to celebrate things like Washington’s Birthday. You know, before we lumped him in with Franklin Pierce and all the rest of the guys who held the office, and who you couldn’t identify in a police lineup. President’s Day. Admit it, you wouldn’t know William Henry Harrison if he coughed on you, which was about all he’d have time to do anyway. It’s just an excuse to sell cars on a random Monday now.
But March 17th is a big deal in Merida. A real holiday. What’s that? Saint Patrick’s Day? Never heard of it. It’s Benito Juarez’ birthday (observed).
Benito is kind of a big deal here in Mexico. If you read Graham Greene novels, you could be forgiven for being at best ambivalent about him. I’m not exactly a whisky priest, but I’d be willing to learn. At any rate, Benito plowed through a secularization of Mexico that curbstomped the Catholic Church a bit. I was trying to come up with an equivalent American counterpart to Bennie, but came a cropper. Not old Muttonhead. Maybe more like Lincoln. Nah, bad fit. The only close comparison I could come up with was Henry the Eighth, busting up the monasteries. Benito had a great deal fewer wives, so on balance he was the luckier of the two.
Of course St. Patrick’s Day isn’t a holiday in the city of my peeps, Boston, Massachusetts, either. But the entire city government was infested with Irishmen, so they needed some cover for a day off, and Benito Juarez’ birthday wasn’t going to cut any ice in The Hub. So they came up with Evacuation Day. It’s an official holiday only at the county level. That county, Suffolk, just happens to cover the city of Boston, plus Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop. That also just happens to cover all the office buildings full of government workers who want the day off, with pay, because no matter how much we wish it, the Charles River ain’t beer, and a day off with pay is necessary to fill the glasses. It’s supposed to commemorate the British evacuation of Boston during the Revolutionary War, but everyone knows it’s really to commemorate the evacuation of every government building in Boston. Their denizens flee to a Hibernian Hall to tell bad jokes and drink, in no particular order.
So we walked down the delightful Paseo de Montejo under false colors, as it were, to find succor and Succat at Hennessey’s Irish Bar. It was a cool evening, in the 70s, and the street was thronging with pedestrians out promenading and eating repulsive marquesitas as they strolled.
Hennessey’s is indoors and out, with tables arrayed along the sidewalk, and all sorts of interior corrals for human cattle. It was there, right on the dividing line between the inner sanctum and the outer darkness, that we were brought up short by a terrible gorgon. A single headed, single-minded Cerberus guarding the gates of, if not the underworld, at least the inner world. A Medusa I dared not defy, or look directly in the eye.
Actually, it was a cute little woman, barely old enough to drink, and not able to turn me to stone with a look from her eyes. I simply can’t get down low enough to look most Meridians in the eye without kneeling down. But she told me the inside was full, demasiado, and we couldn’t go in.
There is no way to pull rank in these situations. I could mention, casually, that I’m likely the only even vaguely Irish person in this city at the moment, except the owners of Hennessey’s. I could reel off an Irish blessing, or sing Black Velvet Band if the money’s right. These would seem dubious credentials to the tiny enemy at the gate. The PA system was playing U2 and the Cranberries instead of the Chieftains, so I’d just seem old and in the way, instead of simply in the way. We retreated to a table outside, and plotted.
I studied the problem briefly. My Irish credentials would do no good, so I had to rely on my Irish capabilities. I could be devious with the best of them. The Gaels had Englishman pushing them around for 700 years, and when it was over, they looked ’em in the eye and said, “You never laid a glove on me, Tommy.” Mexicans are not devious. They have no natural antibodies that would protect them from an Irishman.
We approached her again, and she saw us coming, and gestured rather forcefully for us to retreat to our streetside lair, and make the best of it. But my Spanish siege engines were in place before I started my assault: Mi esposa necesita el baño, por favor. I instructed Mrs. Sippican to hop back and forth to complete the lie.
The gates of Guinness opened for us like a charm. We walked five feet inside the door, and a dozen people at the bar roared my name over the din. For one, brief, shining moment, I was the the Mexican-Irish Norm Peterson.
It was only modestly difficult to explain why we had to hide in the bathrooms for a few minutes before joining everybody. I’m afraid of the little girl.
Well, Happy Santo Patricio Dia to one and all from Merida, Yucatan. If the headline confuzzles you, I’ll explain. The old bastid Oirish holiday was referred to as “Opposite Day” because it was the one day out of the year when mom was drunk and dad was crying.
I used to be a working musician, and three out of the four of us had names that would make Michael Collins mention us in dispatches, but we referred to the holiday as “Amateur Hour.” It’s when the alcoholics stay home, and everyone else attempts the lifestyle without the proper portfolio. I never really participated in the holiday back in the US. Merida, Mexico isn’t about to turn over the town to green beer and boiled dinner, so I’m pretty safe here. Almost.
My father was so Irish he left shamrocks in the septic system. He didn’t care for the holiday much that I can remember. He was Bostonian. That was about the most Irish place the US has ever seen. An Irishman once ran for mayor of Boston from his cell in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. He won, too. He had taken a civil service exam for another guy, so the guy could get a job he wouldn’t have otherwise. His campaign slogan, IIRC, was “He did it for a friend.”
My father did many things for a friend. He died penniless, but universally beloved in the city of his birth. His funeral cortege was fronted by a large cavalcade of various policemen on motorcycles. They rode out onto the Northeast Expressway, which was once the most heavily trafficked patch of pavement in the world. They stopped the traffic dead to let my father pass by on the way to his well-deserved rest in the military cemetery down near Cape Cod. I was informed later that many of them got into trouble for it. They didn’t care. They did it for a friend.
My mother wasn’t Irish, and hated the whole enchilada, to mix my metaphors. We had to visit our grandma’s triple-decker (sorta, it was brick) in the rundown inner city to get boiled dinner. I still remember the recipe:
I was mostly confused by the whole affair at the time, but I assure you I’d kill ten innocent men to go back there and do it again just once. Luckily for everyone, I’ve never met ten innocent men, and in my milieu, I’m not likely to.
Irishmen are not thick on the ground here in Merida. I’ve never met another while I’m here, but I’m thick enough to cover for the whole race. Mexico has been pestered by most every kind of foreigner over the years, but shamrocks don’t grow in jungles. But fear not. Two Irishmen, at least, have long since made their way to Merida, and they run the Yucatan’s version of Sloppy Joe’s Bar: Hennessey’s Irish Bar on the Paseo de Montejo.
I have been in Hennessey’s. That tortured grammar sounds like the sort of admission you’d make to a cranky spouse. Luckily I brought my spouse with me, so I don’t have to explain why I know Shane the bartender, and why he calls me by name, and why I was once embraced like a brother on the street by Diego, the other bartender. It’s a fun place, desolated with the usual bric-a-brac like Quiet Man posters and funhouse maps:
But look! They have a separate room labeled Irish Writer’s Room.
This seems wise. If you know anything about Irish writers, you’d segregate them from the general population as quickly as possible, and send out for more booze. If a Welshman sneaks in, they’ll be roaring drunk and fighting in no time. As G.K. Chesterton wrote [Thanks to Gerry in the comments for correcting this attribution]:
“For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.”
So, I might not exactly qualify as an Irish writer, but I’m as close as Merida is going to see, so I went in there. The walls were vandalized with the usual Irish writer’s mafia. Here’s a taste.
I saw Bill “The Butler” Yeats, and Oscar “The Painter” Wilde. Samuel “Godot’s not Here, Coppers” Beckett of course, and James “Cyclops” Joyce. This is a familiar grouping, I’ll bet, but I’ll also wager it’s the first time they’ve ever been displayed right next to a hammock hook. I scanned the crowd in the room. They were all Mexican, and watching Africans and South Americans play metric football nowhere near Ireland, or South America or Africa, now that I think of it. I retreated.
So we will not be alone on Opposite Day. We will wander up the Paseo Montejo to Hennessey’s, and meet a dozen or two people who have befriended us already, and maybe leave with a few dozen more in our back pocket. The one where Whatsapp lives. And I will tell a bad Irish joke or two, or the same one twice, as is customary. And I’ll raise a Black and Tan to the memory of my father.
I never realized until it was too late to tell him that he was the best friend I ever had. He never even hinted that idea to me, but I found it somewhere along the way. Instead of amusing himself, he put his life on the shelf, like fathers do, and raised me up — holding onto the seat of my bicycle while I pedaled furiously and thought I was doing it by myself, picking me up off the ice at the rink, over and over, knocking out my baby teeth playing catch, taking me to the graves on Veteran’s day, letting me steer the car while I sat in his lap, instructing me on how to swear correctly at the Red Sox, sotto voce so mom can’t hear and get us into Dutch, and occasionally sneaking me a sip of his beer. But it’s obvious to me now.
He did it for a friend.
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