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.

Negative balance

When the Red Line crosses the Salt and Pepper Bridge, you get that glorious view, Beacon Hill shouldering Back Bay stretching to Kenmore Square, lined on the edge of an ice-jammed Charles. The sight has to cheer, especially midweek midafternoon on a trip to book Mecca, Harvard Square. Underground to Kendall (they have books) and Central Square (2 or 3 stores) - and then grey settled as I emerged into daylight. Cherry Chinese lanterns lining Mass Ave for the New Year couldn’t lift the gloom.

And it hit me – the bank to bookstore ratio, down from nearly 30 shops when I was young, long before Abercrombie met Fitch. The robber barons and their brats have squeezed the books out of the Square, and they wouldn't give you the price of an overdue library fine.

The question remains: who reads and what do we read - tea leaves, tweets, tv guides. And why we don’t read: the tragic legion (growing) of those who can’t, and those who won’t (sorrier still) and those who will not anymore. So little time, I suppose. ‘Souvenirs’ of culture are stacked 8 deep next to my bed, and a dozen more queue in my head…who am I kidding?

Maybe a quarter of a million books were published last year, and here we are making more. Just a couple dozen each year, and good books, but more books, and fewer eyes to see. Well, let there be a bounty, more than we can consume. Welcome more than we can ever read so the world has no known boundary. My sin is too many books, and I am guilty.

New year, new world

Poems to the contrary, February is the cruelest month in Boston. While it makes for some pretty pictures on postcards, the days are just not warm enough, the wind is just a little too strong, and the snow is under my skin. It’s those hidden patches of ice, waiting to throw you down, that get to you. Still, the days are just a bit longer, and we’re all trying on some hope. A young president promises relief from our pain, and you want to believe. But it is a long way to summer, no joking.

So I dug out a November photo of Howth, jutting out into the Irish Sea, a bus ride from Dublin, and remembered to look up. Liz would stop in her tracks when I would exclaim the size of the Irish sky. You always say that, O’Hare, and how can a sky be any bigger anywhere. But for a small island, Ireland has a big lid, sweeping in from the west, dragging the wet of the Atlantic across the fields and up damp streets. “A soft day” is a day when the rain isn’t hard. Tromping the hills of Howth, home to the Norse and John Banville and a shower of tourists when the day is fair, on a promontory stuck out into the sea, a stone's throw from Ireland's Eye, the sky can swallow you up. Fast moving, fierce clouds mingle with the sea in a primordial swirl, and when the sun breaks through – it always breaks through – it’s a hand of god moment.

Boston this February is cruel, cold, broke. Economic slush and social calamity. But I chanced to look up, spied a star - Orion’s left foot? A wandering planet? One Twin? And the glimpse saved me.