PictureThe author - age 7 (?)
St. Patrick's Day was always  a huge celebration at our house when we were growing up. Maybe even bigger than Christmas… Well, OK…that's a wee bit of an exaggeration. It wasn't really bigger than Christmas, but it kind of felt that way thanks to my father.  It didn't matter if it was a weekday or a weekend, my father kicked things off bright and early with Dennis Day and the Irish Rovers blasting at full volume on the Zenith stereo console that took up half our living room. (I used to kid him that it wasn't a stereo, it was a piece of furniture!) My brother would roll over in the bed next to mine in the room we shared, clamp a pillow over his ears and moan "make him stop." I didn't mind so much — mostly because I was just happy to see my father in such a good mood: whistling, humming, even singing.  My siblings and I then dressed head to toe in green and headed off to school. Jesus you never saw so much green in your life. I even had this silly little clip on Irish tie that I had to wear. It was green and looked more like a bow than any tie I had ever seen. 
PictureCleveland St. Patrick’s Day Parade
The great thing about St. Paddy's day is that very often my father would collect us all from school around 11 o'clock to take us downtown for The Parade.  It was as if it were a real holiday and there was fuck all the nuns could do about it because: A) Patrick was a saint (and he could kick St. Anthony's ass we used to tell all the Italian kids in school.  B) Jack Collins kept the nuns beat up cars running for free, and C) it was better to have us anywhere than a classroom at St. Clare's because we were all wound up tighter than coiled springs… Inevitably the parade was freezing (it was Cleveland in mid March after all), but we didn't care. There were squealing bagpipes, men in kilts, and everybody seemed to be friends with everybody else.
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One year I bought my father an Irish flag for Christmas. You would have thought, from his reaction, that I was presenting him with the pot of gold that I had somehow managed to find at the end of the rainbow. He used to fly that flag every year on St. Patrick's Day out in front of his Sohio gas station on Mayfield Rd. After he lost the gas station, he draped it across the front door of the house. Nobody ever said a word if it stayed up past March 17th. The year he died, one of his good Irish buddies on the City Council came and got the flag from us and flew it from the top of Lyndhurst City Hall. I wish I had a picture of that, but I was living in Washington by then. Eventually the flag became mine, and for the past seven years Lori and I have proudly flown it from the front of our house, heralding one of our favorite gatherings of the year: the Druid Drive Annual St. Patrick's Day Party. We almost lost it one year to the sharp teeth of a frisky chocolate lab named Guinness, but our friend Suzanne worked her sewing machine magic, and it looks as good as new. Jack would be happy.

On that note, in an effort to find an appropriate tune that bridged the old and the new, my father's tastes and my own… today's Happy Medium Song of the Day is a traditional song performed by a recent discovery. Happy St. Patrick's Day. This is “Finnegan's Wake” by The Tossers from Chicago. (Please use the comments box to share your thoughts.)