Irish Sighs

Now is the silly season in Boston. Except for mold, there isn’t enough green to upholster a pillow, but plenty of faux emerald on the endcaps in Stop and Shop. And nutty hats. Guinness is the maddest haberdasher, planting fixtures like fireplugs atop the suburban public which, it appears, has just discovered drink.

From famine era to current frivolity, the Irish have contributed mightily to our city: presidents, playwrights, mayors and mafia, a checkered achievement. And, once landed on these shores, wasted no time in beating the tar out of the next wave of newcomers, in good American fashion.

Yet, like the rest of our immigrant nation, they were once scared and hungry. The woman who saved us sailed three months to the new world. Her dowry, a featherbed coverlet tatted by the nuns, rests in my closet in an 1841 brick boarding house run by a succession of Irish dears giving succor and chowder to seamen, before demon drink and the harbor harlots robbed them blind.

I looked up on this when-will-it-stop late winter grey afternoon and saw that flag, big as a mainmast and thin as water, unfurled in the vault of the Boston Harbor Hotel, flapping in the cold Lenten wind, waving its tricolors out to sea, past the Graves Light, where immigrants from countless towns and countries passed the rocky ledge in horror, past the Harbor Islands that hid the Irish mob’s monkey business and gun running, out past Finn’s Ledge, which drowned the crew of the Mary E O’Hara, and no one could save them, a hundred miles past East Boston where, in 1860, 600 who smelled land were lifted off the sinking Connaught, two months out of Galway, past George’s Bank and deep waters where those who tried and failed or were turned back sleep in the cold dark sea.

From coffin boat to Irish cruises, immigrants to emigrants returning, McNamara to Mack, the full circle of migration plays a sweet and mournful song.