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Oh Badi, dear, you have heard. “
The news that tour of a tour?
Shamerouk by law not allowed
To grow on Irish land!
No more St. Patrick’s Day, which we will remain,
Its color cannot be seen,
Because they leave men and women
There to wear “O Green!
– Wearin ‘O’ The Green, C. 1795, anonymous
“Stand up, right!” My mother, born in Irish, was affixed to the blue school uniform shirt, the Eren Ga Prague pin, decorated with the clay tube and the green tape.
“It is the day of St. Patrick! Look, Shamrouk,” I have a generous handful of the tin button. She retreated to admire her manual.
“There is now a lucky Irish boy, you.”
Oh, yes, lucky to me. Good luck to school, it turned on a garaly bottom so that the two girls can narrow my eyes with the fist of the potatoes.
I have a good luck to wear a three -quarters -length coat, called “GYP”, and I feel out of a natural coat from this near the old country.
I am lucky not to miss the early Mass during the six weeks that the bodies shook from the bones.
It is good for me to spend the summer vacations visiting the holy shrines, while all other children were going to the gardens.
It is good to be so poor that the young coordinator who has once suggested that our family must bend an advertising plate for the call of the annual Catholic charitable societies of the diocese, although my father will assure us that we are “not poor, but simply rich in poverty.”
Oh, yes, being an Irish was lucky, like having a lot of homework on a trick or treatment night.
At school that morning, I retreated on my office, in a desperate attempt to hide the shiny alfalfa spray.
“Sitting straight, Mr. Uhara,” my teacher is touched for the fourth grade, sister Maria Thomas. Its strict leadership is a spine calendar like a fast shoe at the back, as the bouquet caught a small bouquet.
“What are the green spaces you wear?” Her voice was almost soft, and she walked towards me.
“Shamerouk, sister.” My face turned red as each head spins in the semester to look at me.
“Goodness, generous, skewer!” She closed, and her hands rise to a white bib of her black habit. “Where did you come before, tell me?”
“I sent my grandmother in Ireland to my mother in a message.” Everything turned hot and itching under her outlook.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” It is the fingers of the small leaves. “Much smaller than the alfalfa that grows here in New England.
“The chapter, did you know that St. Patrick is about the Irish pagan by using the three Shamrok petals to explain the Holy Trinity?
“Now, Kevin, walks in the corridors so that your colleagues can study. Imagine, Shamrouk is original from the island of emeralds!”
I prefer to run the aerukua glove, which was wandering in the role of the old father, Isaac and his brother René Gobeel in Orizville, New York – one of the hot points of holidays. Certainly, the girls smiled in the embarrassing fashion procession, while boys took to Saint Kevin from Sissies.
After the misery march, I collided with my office, but the sister had another idea.
“Kevin, Shamrouk should appear to Saint Regeina’s sister. You will satisfy her like this.”
She went out of the classroom to accompanying snoring and laughter, and to the director’s office, where Saint Regeina’s sister found sitting in her office, hanging in prayer. She was gently an old nun with health failure, and we competed for the privilege of carrying her black bag to the monastery after school.
“What is, a child?” Her weak water eyes raised herself from the daily prayer book.
It turned from the foot to the foot. “Pietate. A.A., Sister Maria Thomas, you want me to show you to see you from Ireland.”
She moved me to her office, where she touched Shamrok’s sensitive posts with thin fingers. Suddenly, she started crying, and reached her deep, mysterious black pockets for a handkerchief. Now, nuns are often angry, many laughed and sang, but I have never seen one cry before.
At the house in that evening, and after the family’s rosary, my father told how Saint Regeina’s sister had brought out her eyes when she showed her a branch of Shamrouk.
“I assume that the dear poor have not yet seen years ago.” My mom has seriously nodded. “She is a birth, coming from Ireland as a little girl.”
She explained that seeing the jaw in the concept of nuns after being outside the monastery, the church and the school, “Most of the sisters in St. Charles Irish.
Boy, this was something to hear him. Whenever you think about the place where the nuns may come from, I imagined that either winged angels sent to the ground to tend to the herd of God, or hatching from black and white eggs on Easter on Sunday. They never talked about parents or siblings, but only from God the Father or the blessed mother, and they have no family except the Holy Family and their dear brothers.
Once I observed a lock from helcat … eh, the hair of the sister Helen Catherine, the black jet, overlooking the bottom of the starchy white Wimple, but that was the only shocking glimpse of the normal humanity of the nun. Otherwise, they were simply creatures of dread and fear.
But now it was completely logical that they were Irish, as they grew up in homes like us like us, with the front rooms full of sacred statue and religious images that your right knee will transmit reflective when entering.
“I pray to God to be able to all visit Ireland again, my mother sighed, during the periods of Saint Patrick’s feast,” and when we do so, I will show you my mother’s winter garden where Shamrouk grows. “
Before I went to the bed that night, I took a look at the Shamrock smart summit on my little meter and I wished to give him to Saint Regeina’s sister. After I reviewed the day of the covers, I reviewed the day of the bus with the events and remembered how the esteemed director had touched the Shamrock as much as it was the remains of her saint.
I was thrown and drew on that long night, and followed up with the dreams of Zamed Island, such as Jawhara in the middle of the dark wide sea. There were Druis and snakes, of course, and a herd of pagan girls barefoot running after St. Patrick across green fields. Through an old stone, they begged the bearded man above the seas to tell them more about his three strange gods in one.
With gratitude for his teaching, they offered him Sally’s baskets lining up in Shamrouk and filled with the eggs-which is a bosom of God’s beloved nuns.
*This story appeared for the first time in Boston Globe on St. Patrick’s day, 2005. Kevin Ohara, author of the book “The Last Pilgrims: a man’s journey through Ireland.” You can learn more about Kevin Ohara on his website Thedkeyman.com.