CUL-DE-SAC

Clan Rince Float

My wife is Irish-Catholic on both sides: Reilly and Lawrence. Her great grand-uncle was Dave Lawrence, a machine politician who was mayor of Pittsburgh and became Governor of Pennsylvania.

The Lawrence line had some Scotch-Irish members that could have suppressed the faith, though that didn’t prevent my mother-in-law from being baptized while an infant by the Roman church when her Presbyterian mother wasn’t paying close attention. It was a blended family with a mixed history, when it came to the sacraments.

That’s the story leading up to St. Patrick’s Day in San Diego, 2013, in which my daughter Sophie (mother is Karen Reilly) rode on the float of Clan Rince, her Irish dance school. Mind you, in the U.S. the celebration of the patron saint doesn’t have a lot to do with being Catholic. It’s mostly an opportunity to drink and be a fool.

I started the day building the float by stapling a skirt to a long truck trailer and decorating the edges with Styrofoam rocks. All around me, people wore green wigs and T-shirts saying things like “Kiss my Irish ass.” The parade was too long, for one thing. It must have taken an hour and a half for the whole thing to process along 6^th Avenue.

Some things were great. Navy brass band? Great! Shriners in their silly little cars? Great! Irish dancers and floats with rock bands? Great! Carlsbad Fire Department, whose fire truck carried five sexy women wearing tartan miniskirts and halter tops? Great!

But you’ve got to put a limit on the number of influence peddlers riding in Corvette convertibles waving to people on the curb who have absolutely no idea who they are. There also needs to be a quota for beauty queens.

The night before I took Sophie to the American Legion Hall in Chula Vista, where she danced in the bar with the other girls from Clan Rince. The place was filled with men and women over 50 who sat at tables in the full light while the bartender served cheap drinks. The room had a small stage. It was filled with good spirit and the people clapped and hooted.

Maybe it was just the music but it seemed Irish. It looked like a center of working-class loyalty and gratitude for ending up in a better place where you can have a drink and know your grandkids are safe and fed and going to school. You’d go to war and risk death to end up somewhere like that.

At the end a waitress passed a hat saying, “Come on. Pony up!” The money was supposed to go to the girls. It was the day before the St. Patrick’s Day so what the hell.

I worry about my parents. I thought of this when I saw my mother drive down my street and sheer the rearview mirror off a parked car. She did it with her own rearview mirror, which stayed in place. I knocked on the door of the house and Jerry told me that rearview had just been replaced and this was the third time someone had torn it off. I gave him my mom’s insurance policy number.

That wasn’t the worst thing that happened that evening.  A hawk attacked one of our chickens in the backyard. It tried to kill it and carry it away, and it left a scattering of feathers on the upper level but didn’t seem able to heft the bird over the fence. We found the hen down below near the chicken coop with its head torn off.

She was named Katie. She was a bantam Cochin chicken meaning she was overly small and that’s why the hawk went after her. She was the most beautiful chicken we had, with honey-brown feathers that were marked with black and white spots. She was the sixth chicken of ours that had died.

Katie was the last one whose name we were sure of. She lived with five other birds that were bigger, three of them we got from a chicken farmer who abandoned them because they weren’t laying at a good enough clip. My kids have learned about death by keeping animals.

Molly the cat went out one night and never came back. Did we hear coyotes howling that night? Sophie and a friend accidentally drowned two baby chicks. She and Nicholas sobbed later that night as we buried them in the garden. Neighbor kids watched as we buried Katie in a deep hole in the canyon. Sophie put a stone next to it. She wrote Katie’s name and age on the rock with a Sharpie.

Maybe they’ve finally learned that the chickens can’t be pets. Don’t give them names. We live in a tough neighborhood for pets.

The loft of the dance studio was filled with props, parts and tools. A box of stakes. A box of wood wedges. A collection of theatrical facades made from Styrofoam to look like rows of rocks. I stood halfway up the makeshift stairs to hand it all down, piece by piece, to another parent of a kid of the school

They will use it to make a float for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The kids will dance on a flat truck bed that’s decorated with fake rocks. They’ll staple a skirt to it and put up a short fence to prevent kids from falling off.

I’d agreed to come and help get stuff down from the loft but there weren’t a lot of people there when somebody said, “So when do we need to get this thing ready in time for the parade?” The answer was Saturday at 6 a.m. in Balboa Park. Shit! I didn’t think I’d volunteered for that.

But I’ll be there with my drill, box of screws and a staple gun.

Wisteria blooms in March.

Her ears are soft and red and they hurt when we tried to put her new earrings back in. My 8-year-old girl wants to get big and getting her ears pierced is part of the deal. I’ve watched her sleep while she wore her first ones, cut-glass studs that are supposed to look like diamonds. But we didn’t leave the new ones in last night. She got back from another trip to the piercing parlor and I heard she would have to wear earrings to bed for two years to keep the holes from closing up.

It takes some commitment to become a big girl with pierced ears.

The wisteria in front my house has become a hillside of purple flowers. It’s that time of year. Rains come in winter. Trees blossom and bees descend on them to lend a humming noise. Rainy season will end soon and I pray for more. I was bred in a place where rain-fed crops are the stuff of survival. But in the Southwest water generally comes from pipes, not the sky.

Meanwhile I teach my kids to take the bus. They need to start taking it home from school, and it will just take a little practice. The first time Sophie couldn’t get the hang of feeding a dollar into the bill wringer. She then tried to stuff five quarters into the coin slot all at once and they got stuck.

The second time I reminded her of that and it made her sulk at the bus stop, crouched against the wall of a shop as she hid her face in her hands. But she did better putting the money in that time. I tell them they have to grow up and become more independent. The city isn’t so scary as long as you know where you’re going and have a cell phone. We’re still working on that second thing.

The bus winds down a hill into a canyon and uphill to the place where (I tell them) they have to pull the cord to request a stop. It’s just a ten-minute walk home, where the wisteria blossoms and I can still watch them fall asleep at night.