When The Moon Sings - March 15, 2025

For green and obvious reasons, this week, I thought of my mother’s family, more properly, my maternal grandmother’s family.  They were Irish immigrants and the offspring of Irish immigrants, and stereotypical in many ways.  For one, they’d kept their connections to the old country.  A few years ago, I spoke here about attending a Saint Patrick’s extended family celebration that turned into something more troublesome.  One of that generation’s number had been found lifeless in an alley during the Irish Civil War, and they still wanted to do something about it thirty years later.  They would have too, if they had been able to determine who was responsible.

My father’s family was distinctly un-Irish and disinclined to mayhem.  My parents kept civil but guarded relationships with those Irish folks, and so did my maternal grandmother, who had gone her own way for a variety of motives.  But there was one person on that side who melted that reserve in all of them – Uncle Willie.

He wasn’t my Uncle Willie – that was how my mother referred to him.  I even doubt he was her uncle – I think he was a third cousin twice removed, or something like that.  During that Saint Patrick’s Day celebration, he had sipped two beers and gone home, before the others got into stronger drink and prospective manslaughter.  The others accepted that – that was just Willie.

That party happened when I was very small.  Time passed, and I grew and began my own life.  My parents retired to Florida, a small town that has since become a high-rise wilderness on the Gulf Coast.  Inspired by an affinity to folk music and hopped beverages, I got to know Irish culture through one particular establishment that had both, and which added a pipe band that came in and jammed after practice on Thursdays.  I even read some history about the times and circumstances that generated those songs, at times with the echoes of the pipe band still ringing in my ears.

I visited my parents perhaps twice a year, and on one visit, they decided that we ought to see Uncle Willie.  He had retired to Florida too, and lived a few hours north, in Saint Petersburg.  It was a few days after Saint Patrick’s when we could travel in Florida without stifling heat.  At that time, Saint Petersburg was an enclave for the elderly.  Retirees had flocked there in great numbers, drawn by small houses easy to maintain, adequate medical care, and several restaurants with early bird specials for dinner.  You could go for blocks without seeing a hair color other than gray.

Uncle Willie greeted us at the door.  He was in his early eighties then, a smaller man, immaculately put together – hair carefully combed, creased Bermuda shorts and a well-pressed shirt.  He had a brush mustache with no hair daring to wander out of place.  His manner was as well-kept as his person, speaking in a precise and humorous way with an Irish lilt, unsullied by long residence in either New York City or Florida.

I can’t remember why, but my parents went off on some mission, leaving Willie and I alone for a while.  Burning with my newfound knowledge of Irish history and culture, I wanted Willie’s perspective on the Civil War, Michael Collins, the IRA, or any of that.

But Willie had adopted the philosophy of Elwood P. Dowd in the movie Harvey, namely (quote)  “In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” (end quote) Dowd coped by inventing a six-foot rabbit – Uncle Willie coped by losing his memory.  Collins?  Oh, Willie remembered reading something in the newspapers about him, but couldn’t remember what.  But the gleam in his eye told me more than the words that left his mouth.  Everything else ended the same way.

I suspect that was a lifelong habit.  Willie coped with troubled times and great events by digging under them until they washed away.  Willie believed that opinions were toxic, anything beyond planning for dinner became suspect and subject to forgetfulness.

Time still marches on.  That visit occurred decades ago.  Uncle Willie isn’t with us any more, nor are the relatives with murderous intent.  Savannah celebrates Saint Patrick’s Day without reference to ugly memories and dark intentions, and we are better for it.  We’d rather have green beer than bodies in an alley.  We have the luxury of non-involvement, in that particular dispute anyway.  “May you live in interesting times” is the old Chinese curse, but any time has its interesting moments.

Uncle Willie had taken the time-honored peasant’s route – unless something involved them personally, they tried to ignore it.  The miller who went back to grinding wheat after Becket’s murder, the German peasant who prayed that the armies of the Thirty Years War would not fight among his cabbages, the seamstress who repaired clothes for her village during the Crimean War all did the same thing.

For the most part, the peasant’s way works, but sometimes it can’t.  In four years of rule the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot killed 1.2 million Cambodians, for being insufficiently peasant.  The Russian famine of 1921 and 22 killed 5 million, in part for being far too peasant.  George Rose’s wheatfield in Gettysburg produced no crop in 1863 – instead 4000 men fell dead or wounded there.  I’ll leave out the more obvious examples.

I would be laughably inept as a peasant, and you might be too.  We have transcended serfdom, while retaining that same attitude toward great events.  That evolution has given us interests and passions far beyond our property.  Those interests have made us larger and more sophisticated people, whatever they include – the Chicago Bears, the fate of the whales, the proposed improvement of the rail crossing President Street, or Taylor Swift.  But it also means that things we value beyond our property lines become battered by great events or big ideas.

It also means that the present has too much to be concerned about, that digging up past bitterness and counting old scores to settle only adds to the burden.  Green beer inspires only a limited passion, but it’s far better than the alternative.