Another one of my columns...
St. Patrick drove the snakes (and dust) out of Ireland
By Ben Gildehaus, Teton Valley News
This Friday, St. Patrick’s Day rolls around again. Hence a moment to reminisce about shamrocks, wee folk, corned beef and cabbage, and potatoes—how appropriate for Idahoans. However, since yours truly is only half Irish, you therefore only get half a column. Half Irish, half German—genetically predisposed to love beer.
That, however, would be resorting to stereotype. My mother, who is responsible for my Irish half, is herself almost entirely of the sod, and she detests the stuff—unless it’s “really hot,” the beer is “really cold,” and she’s “really thirsty.” But she does tend to “tidy up” in a stereotypical Irish way. God help us if anyone came to the house and found a speck of dust or a doily askew. She tells me it’s an inherited trait. I rather see it as learned behavior from an early fixation with John Wayne movies. Now, stay with me here. There is a logical progression.
John Wayne made mostly Westerns and war movies, but in 1952 he teamed with John Ford to make The Quiet Man about an expatriate Irish boxing champion who returns to his homeland from America after a tragedy in the ring. Reacquiring his family home, he falls in love with and eventually marries his neighbor, Maureen O’Hara (and here’s the connection) who came into his abandoned cottage to clean it for him when she heard he had managed to buy it right out from under her domineering brother’s nose.
My mother watched that film over and over, especially when St. Patrick’s Day was approaching. And Maureen O’Hara always seemed to be tidying up in that film—dusting, sweeping, polishing “her things,” the silver and crystal and furniture of her dowry. Swept into the charm and romance of this classic ensemble film, Mom somehow internalized the penchant for tidy. Never thereafter could the family leave the house or welcome a guest without beds made, faucets polished, and dust dusted.
Enduring Quiet Man film fests every St. Patrick’s Day gave me an appreciation of my (half) heritage, the lush Irish countryside, Irish humor (Thank you, Barry Fitzgerald.) and yes, apparently beer. But tidying up did not become part of my nature. I can sometimes be the antithesis of tidy.
I prefer instead to fixate on the infamous Quiet Man cottage scene where after the tidying up and in the midst of a gale, John Wayne enters the cottage and grabs the fleeing Maureen O’Hara. Frozen in a cinematic moment, the dust and leaves flying all around them, the music swelling, Maureen suddenly rushes forward, kisses a completely surprised and forever-after smitten John Wayne, and then disappears into the night.
Now that’s my kind of cleaning lady!
