My Irish Eyes

 

My Irish Eyes are Smiling

A'Smiling Up at You

Except my eyes aren't Irish.  If green means Irish, that's a pretty rare eye color. It's less than 2% of the population, and although the Irish may have a slightly higher concentration, it's nowhere near a dominant trait.

My father carefully laid out his ancestry, dating back to the Welshman who first came here in the mid-seventeenth century.  He carefully traces the subsequent 13 generations, but he doesn't often identify the original nationality of those they're marrying. I know they're references to English and  German, but nothing else specific. I'd like to think we played the field.  The only other reference is a vague late 19th-century warning not to marry the "damn Dutch". That type of warning makes me think somebody had already done did that.

My mother's side has no equivalent history.  There is a notion that many were Scotch-Irish.  That doesn't mean Irish. They were Scots who were enticed to go to Ireland (particularly Northern Ireland) to tame the native Irish and keep them in Great Britain. The plan kinda worked and kinda didn't.  The island is now divided between Northern Ireland (part of Great Britain) and the independent Irish Republic.

I've never taken a DNA test.  It may be interesting, but ultimately, I see myself as me, not as a personality driven by the "cultures" of arbitrary nation-states.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. I don't drink beer, green, or any other color.  I've never been to a St. Patrick's Day party. Sometimes I wear green - if I think about it and am going to be around people who care. This year, probably not.  I don't expect to see many people.  But who knows? Because of this blog story, it's more on my mind than it otherwise would be.

This is me.  Yes, I'm lousy at taking selfies.  It was everything I could do just to keep my eyes open.  It's not enhanced like the model's up above.  Hard to tell on the interwebs whether that one is a natural eye color.

Hazel brown?  Hazel green?  Just brown?

I have no idea.  I'm glad there is no place I have to identify my eye color.

I'm not sure how relevant it is that I am or am not Irish.  I do know that Alison and I visited there a few years back, and we fell in love with the place. We have, on occasion, looked at what it would take to move there.  

In this age of the Orange Conman, there are a lot of places we've looked to move to.