Saint Patio’s Day

“Yeah, I’m gonna buy an island in Ire…land,” she says, her hair, dyed-Munster-red and piled up high, wobbles as her head spins from me holding her humble dinner to the Cork man straining for whiskey, while from airplane floor wafts the stench of sweaty feet.

“Yeah, the Eye…rish guverment is sellin’ these islands out in the water over there fer like a hundred dollars …?” she holds out her pudgy palms in disbelief. “I guess they’re that cheap cause they’re all deserted off that rocky-cliffy coast, so I’d need a boat, probly a ladder too.”

“I bet they keep all them desserted islands below in Cork,” I say a bit too loudly, looking to drag the Cork man into the conversation.  “The Cork crowd do love their just desserts.”

It works. The Cork man’s long torso straightens up, momentarily forsaking his quest for nerve calming whiskey, as he simultaneously suppresses a smile and a grimace to say:

“Tis islands now that fucken shower is givin’ away, an’ fer a hunderd bucks, but the same bollixes turnt off t’water in me dead mudder’s house over a two hunderd Euro bill.”

 “Yeah, I guess yer guverment wants people like me ta move ta their islands,” she continues, obliviously re-piling her recalcitrant red hair into a heap atop her head as I proffer my computer hoping she’ll retrieve from it her homemade inflight dinner.

“It’s probly a thing ta get college educated people, like me, into yer country,” a frown flashes wrinkles her button nose, “I mean I as good as graduated, when you go to three different colleges, one of them a university, they should just print you off a degree, … right?”

Her frown deepens and it’s hard to fathom if the source of the frown is her unruly hair or the fact that finishing degrees requires that you … you know … finish them.

“An’ quite frankly, I’ve kinda had it with this country,” she plows on, “I been here like fifty years now, since I got born in Salem hospital on July fourth ninety sev… well, as mom says, that’s none of yer bee’s wax.  But I’m feelin’ like our witches, I’ve given this country everything, an’ what has it given me?”

She scrunches up her face, brow furrowing, nose wrinkling, lips pursing until she looks like a sad-angry five-year-old overwhelmed by a world too harsh for five-year-old emotions and now memory-frozen into a fifty-year-old human body.

“Nuthin, zilch, ZIPPO!” she snarls herself into a sad-angry fifty-something woman sitting next to two Irishmen haunted by their own internally frozen children as we all wait for the Friday evening Boston to Denver flight to takeoff.

This scarily-high-coincidence evening started with me in the airplane aisle seat confoundedly staring at the seat webbed pouch in front of me bulging with someone else’s iPad and water bottle.

Why would someone think this is their seat?

Readying myself for some work catchup on the five-hour flight, I slide my laptop from my backpack and glare down at the floor. What’s an Irish-boy-emotionally-frozen-at-eleven, now stuck in the body an Irishman-in-America-for-forty-years to do when there’s a backpack in the place where, paraphrasing the Seven Drunken Nights song, ‘my ould backpack should be?’

“Mine’s seat A, in by the window,” a clear-skinned, ruthlessly-pony-tailed, twenty-something woman’s words clip out of her red-lipsticked-mouth to her, unshaven, unkempt, I’m-a-ski-bum-deal-with-it twenty-something boyfriend.

“But I don’t really care,” she suddenly injects fake relaxation into her voice, “you take the window, I’ll take the middle.”

“Yeah sure, … whatevers,” he drawls, jamming his whole hand into the riot of hair sticking off his head, pursuing an itch to scratch.

Seat A … is next to the window: My narrowed-by-the-slightest stress mind turns over this aeronautical fact, duly creating turbulence. 

Oh bollix!

I immediately shuffle two seats over leaving the residue of my misplaced anger all over the aisle seat. 

At least now there’s an open place where ‘my ould backpack should be!’

I’ve barely taken control of the window seat, my security perimeter not fully established, when a pale, lanky forty-something man sits gingerly into the aisle seat.

“Apologies,” I say, employing the word I use most often. Indeed, I’m practicing for its prolific use should I one day appear in front of Saint Peter.

“I got mixed… my mind wuz,” I stumble over the actual apology.

“Ah no worries atallatall,” he answers in a suspiciously accepting tone.  “I wuz watchin’ ya when I cum outta the toilet, … amazed I wuz at yer confidence boy, it made me check me boardin’ pass twice.”

Oh Jaysys! I’ve been in a seat where this ould Irishman should be! 

“Yes, yes, false confidence,” I offer, “that’s my strong suit.”

His head and shoulders rock as he laughs.

Turns out he’s a Cork man who works in big pharma as a quality control engineer

“Pintin’ out ta people how wrong dey are,” he says with another head bopping laugh. “Natural enough work fer a Cork man!”

He came to the US on a soccer scholarship but realizing he couldn’t make a living on the playing field and after a season of drunken disappointment, switched colleges when he realized he was a better engineer than goalie.

“Aragh, ‘tis awright, a lot a travel, but sure it bates workin’ for a livin’!” he chuckles, his eyes searching the aisle. “Sometimes I can get an ould attendant ta brin’me  a wee nip a Jameson, I do tell ‘em I suffer from take…off anxiety.”

He coughs out a fake laugh.

“De t’erapist does say ‘tis failure ta launch as a pro soccer player, but sure dat’s ancient history now,” his eyes morph to those of a confused youth before he shakes them back to those of a wandering forty-something engineer. “‘Tis de feelin’ a sudden weightlessness dat gets me.”  

He leans back out into the aisle, his head bopping over and back as he tries and fails to make eye contact with the attendants too busy trying to get humans to shed their it’s-all-about-me for just two minutes so the plane can get boarded in an efficient manner.

The Cork man’s head-bopping whiskey quest is interrupted as a short, squat forty-plus-indeterminate-age woman in jeans, a bottle green, knockoff Celtics sweatshirt and a shock of red hair fills the airplane aisle.

She points at the middle seat.

“That’s me,” she laughs a dry non-laugh, “your bad luck!”

She struggles to sling her bulging carry-on bag into the overhead bin. The Cork man dutifully jumps up and helps as her second attempt stalls mid-hoist. Instantly she releases her grip on the bag and only the Cork man’s disdain for his shoulder sockets prevents damage to airplane floor.  She moves on to immediately stumble-lurching into the middle seat, her pink backpack held out in front like a battering ram.

“Phew,” she exhales flopping onto the seat. “I made it!”  

The Cork man looks at her, then at me.

“De Mayo colours,” he nods at the woman’s red hair and green sweatshirt. “I won’t git a word in edgeways now boy.”

“Ok, now I gotta organize myself,” she says to no one, then turns to me.

“Can you hold this?”

She dumps backpack on top of my computer before I get my chance to apologize for existing.

“The ladies ‘re goin’ to be bossin’ me soon to put my backpack away, but I need stuff in there,” she furrows her brow and reaches over to unzip her faded-soiled-pink JanSport backpack.

“Hold it lower,” she says tersely, “poh…lease, that is. Mom’ll find out if I don’t say my pleases an’ thank yous.”

Not without some effort, she unzippers the backpack, roots around inside and extracts a sandwich bag jammed with two crushed Wonder bread sandwiches, the clear plastic bag smeared with yellowish-brown peanut butter and rich-purple grape jelly.

“Haha, dinner!” she exclaims, “I aint payin’ fer their crappy food.”

Next, she extracts a mortally flattened bag of UTZ Sour Cream and Onion chips.

“Ok, food taken care of, I need a …,” she suddenly lurches over to the Cork man, “can you get one a the ladies, I need a Pepsi.  Sodas are free, right?”

“Jaysys I’m tryin’ ta git their attention meself, ‘tis more than a Pepsi I need, I do have awful takeoff anxiety.”

“Oh, I have pills for anxiety,” she says sitting upright, scrunching her face slightly. 

“But I can’t share them, mom says that’s not coo…,” she shakes her head a bunch.  “Bob junior, … he ruined all that, him an’ the Swampscott police, or was it the Saugus cops.  You can’t drink Scotch with Xanax, Bob junior knows that now, course I’m the one as got in trouble fer givin’ him the stoopid pill bottle.”

“All I’m lookin’ fer is wan wee green bottle, that’ll do me fine, I don’t need none a Pfizer’s magic pills, a dram a Irish whiskey does the magic fer me.”

“‘Re you Eye-rish?” she asks, but not waiting for an answer, gushes on: “I’m Eye-rish too, I’m goin’ to Denver fer the Saint Patty’s day parade, I’m marchin’ with the Patio Furniture Troop.” 

She holds out her palms and shakes here red head.

“Get it? Patty…oh, we play Eye-rish tunes usin’ deck chairs, it’s wicked fun, but I hafta practice or my uncle will be mad that I’m outta step,” again her brow furrows.

“I haven’t done it for a while, problem is mom doesn’t have a deck chair like the ones her brother has,” she shakes her head. “They’re really nice old aluminum ones that make a wicked nice sound when you tap them off the street, you don’t mind if I take my boots off, right, I’ll be marchin’ a ton on Sunday an’ I got wet waitin’ fer the Logan Express, an’ I didn’t polish my boots like mom tol’ me to, an’ now they’re wet an’ if get sore feet in the parade she’ll know I didn’t what she said again, an’ on an’ on ‘til she says now I owe her for the flight cause I’m not followin’ directions, so can I take off my boots, pleeeeaase?”

She spins her head over and back from the Cork man to me; red hair wobbling.

“Oh, sure, sure,” my I-don’t-matter-people-pleaser personality says.

“Play on tru, play on tru,” the Cork man says and returns to his pursuit of an attendant’s eye that he hopes will lead to a fluid ounce-and-a-half of hard alcohol.

“Here, gimme that, but hold these … please,” she says, taking the backpack from me, handing me the peanut butter and jelly smeared sandwich bag and chips, as she push-kicks the pink backpack in under the seat in front.

She sighs heavily, fake-fusses with her hair that won’t defy gravity and seemingly forgets about her boot removal plan and her food while I obsess about getting rid of the chips before I get proximity-high-blood-pressure from their 1000% daily sodium content.

“Have you got my Pepsi yet?” she turns to the Cork man still leaning out into the aisle on his quest for Jameson.

From his position angled into the aisle, he turns his Cork eyes to glare at her, but now she’s remembered the boot removal and is unlacing them with a series of sigh-grunts and sharp breaths.

“Workin’ on it,” the Cork man says, keeping up his glare at the side of her head.

“Thank you so much, that’s so nice of you,” she says distractedly tugging off a soggy-scuffed-black leather boot.

Immediately the stench of sweaty feet wafts up from the airplane floor.

My likely never to get fired up computer now acts as a tray for her smeared sandwich bag and chips.

“Ok, I’m ready for the ladies now…,” she exhales, unsheathes the second wet sock, releasing a fresh waft of sweaty feet smell.

Looking around, and apparently not liking the sound of airplane silence, she says:  

“Yeah, I’m gonna buy an island in Ire…land.”