Always in a hurry, I was born on the way to the delivery room and then walked at eight months. This was confirmed by my mother's memory of me toddling around at her father's funeral although I can't remember it. Or him either, he was an Ulster Presbyterian from Belfast who became a Christian Scientist once he moved to America. His wife, my grandmother, was Isle of Man Anglican; in other words, they were strictly tee-totaling lace curtain, and one can only imagine how upset they were when my mother got mixed up with my Mick father. I have friends who have either a single black or Jewish grandparent and say that one quarter of their heritage makes them who they are. This was how my father's father's Catholicism affected the family. Not so much about the church, but politics and patriarchal rage.

Legend has it my paternal grandfather stowed away on a boat leaving Cork while the Black and Tans were looking to hang him for blowing things up. He supposedly jumped ship in Nova Scotia, swam ashore and then wandered around Ontario until he met my grandmother who was there on vacation. She was Irish too but came to the States as an infant with her mother after her sailor father drowned in a fishing accident. Her mother got remarried to a Michigan farmer who adopted her two orphan daughters and raised them as strict Methodists. I believe that my Methodist grandmother made my Catholic grandfather take the Pledge not to drink before she married him. Either way, he was a very angry man who had no tolerance for children. I learned quite young to gauge his mood by how much English he was speaking. The thicker his brogue the angrier he was, and Gaelic meant all small children should get out of the house. He stabbed me with a fork once for having my elbow on the dinner table.  My brother and I didn't eat with my parents since our father had an aversion to small children too, so our table manners were not the best.

But I loved my grandfather; I still get a thrill when I hear an Irish accent. Besides being Sinn Fein, his siblings were horse thieves and prostitutes. Not a lot of job skills there, so there was not a lot of money to be had either, especially during the Depression when my grandfather is said to have been running booze across the frozen Great Lakes gangster style, although he was working as a mailman by the time I knew him. Which is probably why a whole other family from across town showed up at his funeral and introduced themselves to my father and his sisters saying they were his children and grandchildren too. I met one of them once, those long lost half cousins, in New York, in a bar, who insisted I looked like his sister and that we were related. I ignored him, we’d both been drinking and I didn’t trust him, but he had too much information for it not to be true.

Ah, the luck of the Irish, I wore green on Tuesday – did you?