ten things in advance of st. patrick's day weekend in my massachusetts hometown
Wednesday we flew east all night through a wind that worked like a kitchen mixer to keep me bolted upright as an exclamation point while two and three then four wound away. In Holyoke, later, I had corned beef and eight beers. In bed, after, I cried into my fists and on Megan for no particular reason then slept til noon. Today though all is sunny again except the actual sky which has a complete cloud cover.
This weekend a few hundred thousand people from the surrounding area plus us prodigals journeying from afar will pour into the dead paper mill city I grew up in to drink Bud Light from green aluminum bottles and hear bagpipes and strummin drummin rebel songs in parking lot tents. There’s a parade and novelty t-shirts. Glue on leprechaun beards and posters about the road rising up to meet you and minty foams of vomit in the alleys. It’s an alcohol abuse spectacle disguised as celebration of a vague heritage which is no longer the magical fandango I felt it to be as a child but I do like the songs. I did want to come back.
I was twelve or thirteen before I realized the Monday after the St. Patrick’s Day parade isn’t a holiday from school but rather my parents were just hungover and never took us.
While Megan and I are staying in my childhood bed, Tyler has a room at a nearby hotel with a hot tub where I’ll be boiling off my sins before dinner.
I’d write more but I only have my phone and the internet at my mother’s house in the trees barely works.
I’d write more but I’m preparing to see the local Bruce Springsteen cover band tonight.
I’d write more but I’m pretzeled in a club chair while Megan works on her laptop and my sister watches Modern Family on a television I can see but not hear and out the window by my shoulder is where we buried our cat and at the bar I’ll see people again from a life I cut away from my body with scissors which is basically fine just strange and bleary and it’s all creamy Aran sweaters and green beads and forgotten versions of me playing back in bloodshot eyes. Well, anyway.
I’m ready for a drunk hot dog and to see the Shriners in their tiny cars doing wheelies in the street. I have even missed the wretched plastic trumpets in hot pink or kelly green and blue that unwitting parents buy for their children from balloon and stink bomb vendors and the hateful sounds they make. It makes me itchy and sharp edged, I think, to be around too many people who knew a me I was still constructing but that doesn’t make it truly bad. I will wave to the colleens on their float and be happy the way I have been happy and can be happy and I’ll remember what it was like to be small here and feel great, sick love for that girl but not miss her at all.
I love a wilty green carnation in my hand or on a fireman’s lapel or behind somebody’s sunburnt ear.
When I was a child I loved this song tremendously and although it is copaganda I still do