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Mom made me wear green, even though I really didn’t have much green to wear. I’d grown out of my Scooby-Doo shirt from kindergarten, and the only thing that would fit me was this sort of off-lime athletic shirt — the kind that clung to every curve of my body. I hated it, not just because I was self-conscious about my weight, but because it wasn’t the right color green. I looked like a water balloon.
As I stepped into the classroom, my snow boots still dripping, most of my classmates were already there. Everyone wore green. They were jumping and yelping and running about, pinching each other. Kyle Johnson ran by me and glanced my way. He stopped his feet and hurried to me with a big smile. My face wrinkled with confusion. Kyle and I weren’t friends. In fact, I hated being around Kyle because he smelled and never helped with anything in class. Mom always told me to be nice to him, though. He was supposed to be some sort of distant family, I guess. Also, she said that his family didn’t have as much as we did, not that we really had much, either. Anyway, Kyle, grinning, stomped his feet as he reached me and pinched me right on the nipple. A real purple-nurple situation.
“Ouch! What the heck?”
Kyle giggled. “You’re not wearing green.”
“Am too.” I pulled open my coat and stretched the shirt's fabric for him to see. Kyle studied it for a moment.
“That’s not green.”
“What? Yes, it is,” I said.
“Nu-uh. That’s like dead grass.”
“Dead grass is still green.”
“Not the right kind of green. You have to be wearing — like that —” Kyle pointed at Tammy Kenworthy. She wore a bright emerald sweater with Tinker Bell on the front.
“It’s still green,” I said.
Kyle shook his head. “Not the right kind. Sorry.” He pinched me again and ran away.
I didn’t care much for 1st grade. My teacher — Mrs. Riley — was a mean old crone. I remember the first day of class; she stormed in and screamed at us. I don’t even know what it was about. I just remember her yelling. But that day, Mrs. Riley wasn’t scowling like usual. Instead, she seemed, well, nice. She wore a long white dress with a fluffy green sweater overtop it. Her usual reading glasses were replaced with these funky shamrock ones covered in green glitter. “Alright, class,” she said. “Come sit down here by the board.” Mrs. Riley was smiling. It was nice, but in that deeply uncomfortable sort of way because it could have been a trap.
We all paced warily to her feet and sat. The last time she was that friendly, Tammy Kenworthy got duck-taped to a chair for being too excitable. “So,” she continued. “Does anyone know what day it is today? Yes, Micah?”
“St. Patrick’s Day?” said Micah, rocking himself back and forth.
“Very good. And who can tell us what St. Patrick’s Day is about? Yes, Ashley?”
“On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone wears green, and if you don’t, you get to pinch them!” The whole class broke into minor chaos, leaning over and across each other, resuming their pinching wars. Kyle got me again in the nurple.
“Sit with your hands to yourselves, now.” Mrs. Riley’s original persona was back, and the class fell into terrified obedience in a moment. For a few seconds, she scowled at us all, biting her fat lower lip, but then her smile came back just like that — like she was putting on a mask. “St. Patrick’s Day is about celebrating St. Patrick and Ireland. Does anyone know what Ireland is? Yes, Maggie?”
“It’s a country, right?” said Maggie Nostrant.
“Very good, Maggie. What else do we know?”
Beside me, Kyle put on a really confused face, but then raised his hand earnestly.
“Yes, Kyle?”
“I don’t know if this is right, but isn’t it full of angry people, and they blow each other up with bombs and stuff a lot?”
“Well, yes, Kyle,” said Mrs. Riley without missing a beat, “but that’s not really what we’re talking about right now.”
For the rest of the morning, Mrs. Riley told us about Ireland and the people who came from there. She told us about St. Patrick driving away the snakes. About how lots of people left because they were poor and there was no food. How they came to America and dug the Erie Canal. St. Patrick’s Day was how Americans celebrated their Irish heritage.
Mom was washing the dishes when I got home. The house smelled like freshly baked cookies and lemon pledge. “Welcome home,” she said without turning away from the sink.
“Mom, are we Irish?” I sat down at the kitchen table and took a cookie from the baking tray. It was still warm and gooey.
“What?”
“We were talking about St. Patrick’s Day at school, and Mrs. Riley said that most Americans are Irish.”
“Well, I don’t know much about that… A lot of people say they are, but yeah, we’re Irish. On both sides, actually.”
“Really?” I was excited. I don’t know why, but I was. Something about those words — we’re Irish — made me feel special like the whole world was celebrating something about me, I guess. It was cool. “Does that mean we have culture?” I asked.
“What?”
“Mrs. Riley said that St. Patrick’s Day is about celebrating Irish culture.”
“Oh. I don’t know. Sure?”
“What does culture mean?”
My mom sighed loudly and took her hands from the soapy water. She reached for a towel and turned to me. “Culture is like… Like food and music and things.”
“There’s Irish food and music? Like how there’s Mexican food?”
“I suppose,” she said.
“What Irish food?”
“Well, that, I don’t know. Potatoes, I guess.”
“You don’t know? But I thought you said that we were Irish?”
“More on your father’s side than mine. Why don’t you ask him when he gets home?”
I nodded and reached for another cookie.
My Dad opened the sliding glass door at six o’clock, smelling of metalwork and peppermint schnapps. Even though he was only 35, the red of his hair was already fading into a ghostly white — what was left of it, at least.
“Hello, Lovers,” he said to my mom. “Son,” to me.
“Hey, Dad, we’re Irish, right?”
“What?”
“They learned about St. Patrick’s Day at school,” said my Mom.
“Oh,” said Dad. “Umm, yeah, we are. Why?”
“What’s Irish food?”
“What?”
“Like, you know how there’s Mexican and Italian food? What Irish food?”
“Well, fuck, I don’t know,” said Dad.
A few months later, I’d forgotten about St. Patrick’s Day and Irishness and all that shit about the right color green. My mother made us a Boiled Dinner — Americanized Bacon & Cabbage — and potatoes. I hated it because it smelled like farts. As we ate, someone on the news was talking about President Clinton and how he was coming home from a place called Belfast. They showed some clips of him and a bunch of other people bowing their heads and looking really sad. I asked my mother what the IRA was. She told me to clean my plate.
Isaac Grimaldi is an author from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University, where his work centers around Queer Horror, Irish-American identity, and interrogations of masculinity. His work has been featured in PRISM Magazine. To learn more about Issac, please visit isaacgrimaldi.com.
I agree about the cooked cabbage smell. I say corned beef, hold the cabbage - somewhere else. I'm partly Irish and don't care.