Permanent daylight The journey to find one’s Irish roots

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Not only is today the day St. Pat died, but it is the day I was born, and what is a column without a little self-promotion?

Being born on such a merry day has always made me venerate the Irish. This year, in preparation for the drunken holiday, I decided to exchange the STDs of the MTV-style Spring Break festivities for a chance to romance the Blarney Stone, find out just what makes the Irish so special and why we all want to be like them.

I was always determined to find some part of me that was Irish. I’d once met a fellow with the Brand surname who claimed to be Irish, but my hopes of verifying said Irish descent were slaughtered during my first day in Dublin. I went to the coat of arms store on a quay by the Liffey and discovered I was not Irish in the least: The family is decidedly Scottish. There were no shot glasses or coasters with a Brand coat of arms that the locals try to sell to the myriad of Irish-American tourists that clutter the Dublin streets. Alas.

Later that night, I went to a pub, and upon hearing my roommate and I were American, the gents we were chatting with instantly interjected with “but what part of you is Irish? Every American claims to be,” while trying to withhold the mockery in their voices. They were shocked, but apparently pleased to hear we were completely foreign and did not pretend to be Irish, and they subsequently bought us beer.

A few days later in the city of Cork, I was conversing with local man-of-the-moment Ronan. He ran trivia night at one bar, open mic night at another, taught self-esteem classes to elementary school students, and everywhere we went people seemed to know him. I considered him an authority on Irishology and decided to ask him how he felt about the pseudo-Irish.

“Well the O’Brands come from the North and raise racing chicken,” he told me. Seeing my elation at finding some remote ancestry in the Celt country, he noted that chickens don’t race, and even if Brand was Irish, it didn’t matter.

“You’re only Irish if you were born here,” Ronan said definitively. He confessed to being slightly annoyed with the fact that so many Americans can’t admit they are just American and instead deny that we have a culture of our own that is quite different from what our ancestors experienced in the old country.

Nevertheless, our non-Irishness did not exclude us from all things …ireann. “Celebrating St. Pat’s day is about celebrating Ireland,” Ronan said. “It’s definitely cool if the non-Irish do it.”

After a week of history lessons, music appreciation, castle climbing, fluffy sheep and Euro spending, I had one good last night back in Dublin in the touristy Temple Bar part of town. For about four hours, I fell madly in love with a local student named Paul who wanted to name our children after indie rock bands. Oh, how sweet life would be if I could trade him EU citizenship for a Green Card and hear sweet nothings whispered in my ear with his charming accent every so often. If you’re not born Irish, you can still marry into being one. Had we been in Vegas, I would’ve surely returned home eloped.

Then I found out that Paul, like many of his friends, had lived in Boston for a summer. He wanted to move back and dreams of lecturing at MIT after he gets his degree in engineering. There I was, all the way in Dublin, only to find that the perfect person had been dwelling in Dorchester, only to meet him three years and six time zones later. Oh cruel timing, oh devious fate!

It was only on that last night I realized that almost all me Irish brogues had either lived or wanted to live in the United States. Paddy wanted to be an ornithologist, and since there was no market for that in Ireland, he wanted to work with American universities; the boys in Cork said Ireland was too small and they needed to move to the United States; and Andrew had lived in San Francisco but wanted to try out the East. Everyone was drinking Bud, and even the trivia questions Ronan wrote had almost every question come from an American song or movie. Moreover, there was nowhere in Ireland to get a decent slice of cheap pizza. By the end of the week, I realized that as fabulous as Ireland may be, everybody wants what he or she cannot have. Maybe it was OK not to be Irish after all.

Nine hours, two buses, two planes and one T ride later, I was walking back onto ivy-lined Buswell Street in Boston. I took in the smells, sights and sounds of my cozy neighborhood and ran into the closest pizza parlor. It was good to be home. After all, three Irish pubs were a five-minute walk away.

So on this St. Patrick’s Day, love the little bit of Irish in you, even if it’s just Guinness, while remembering that sometimes what you crave and are looking for is in America. Maybe it was dwelling in Boston all along, even if it takes a pilgrimage across the pond to find that out.