Free It's All Relative by Wade Rouse Page B

aren’t.”
    My dad looked Irish, however, with his sandy-blond-reddish hair, his short, scrappy stature, his pale skin, and, of course, his love o’ the ale.
    And my dad attended the University of Missouri-Rolla, an excellent engineering school that was perhaps more famous for its St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. My father was in a fraternity that helped lead the green riot on campus, and every St. Patty’s Day he prided himself on wearing an old sweatshirt from his frat-boy days that featured a drunken leprechaun dancing on a four-leaf clover.
    When he looked in the mirror, I’m convinced he saw Danny Kaye.
    I remember emerging every year as a high schooler on St. Patrick’s Day morning to a giant pinch from the green Grinch.
    â€œOuch!”
    â€œWhere’s your green?”
    â€œStop it, Dad! I don’t wear kelly green! No one should!”
    â€œWe’re Irish!” he would say.
    Now, our family was about as Irish as the O’Charley’s restaurant chain. We were mutts, Ozarkians, a chromosome away from being cave dwellers or performing in minstrel shows. We were anything but Irish.
    I would roll my eyes dramatically at my father, who would pinch me again, harder, out of spite, before returning to a skilletful of scrambled eggs that he had dyed with green food coloring.
    Every St. Pat’s Day, on cue, just as I would pour my bowl of Quisp cereal, my dad would look out the kitchen window, the strong March wind whipping our oak branches around, and say, in an awful Irish brogue, “Oh, you know, a windy day is the wrong one for thatching.”
    Come again?
    â€œLooks like it might rain,” he’d continue. “You know, you can take the man out of the bog but you can’t take the bog out of the man.”
    Seriously?
    â€œMay your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow, and may trouble avoid you wherever you go.”
    That’s when I would grab my books, coat, and keys, and sprint for the back door.
    And then I went away to college, and my father’s Irish eyes smiled upon me, and my first roommate was as stereotypically Irish as you could get: Irish name. So pale as to burn under a one-hundred-watt bulb. Solar system of red hair (in fact, a full-on ’fro in homage to Julius Erving). Funny as hell. Could drink the entire Rat Pack under the table. He was even prone to offering up phrases at the drop of a hat, such as when making a toast: “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm uponyour face. The rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.”
    Though he would lead me into more trouble than Eve, he became one of my best friends, and my father couldn’t have been prouder—more so even than if I had gone on to marry Angie Dickinson.
    In graduate school I seemed to have been blessed by my father’s green blood again, as another Irishman danced into my life via one of my journalism classes. He, too, was clever as hell and prone to partying. I remember my first week at Northwestern, when the professors tossed us newbie reporters onto the streets of Chicago and told us to return at the end of the day to hammer out a story on deadline on a typewriter. It was so
All the President’s Men
.
    I returned, feeling like a real city boy for the first time in my life, only to be called out by a professor for using the verb “get” in my lead.
    â€œLaziest verb in our vocabulary!” he screamed. “Who wrote this?”
    I raised my hand, head down, the professor continuing, “Class? Give me twenty verbs better than ‘get’!”
    As my new classmates fed off my carcass to prove their worth, my soon-to-be new Irish friend finally said, as the class quieted down, “Get off his ass and
get
a life, you pathetic suck-ups!”
    He saved my life. He could’ve led me to the top of the building