This coming Sunday, March 15, about 350,000 people will line the curbs of Western Avenue, starting at 103rd Street and heading south, as the 30th South Side Irish Parade takes place. There will be high school bands, floats, neighborhood
groups, boy scouts and girl scouts and thank you, very few politicians. There will be kids in big floppy green hats and cops and firemen and the curly haired little dancers and green bead necklaces.
Garfield Goose will be there, and so will a lot of bagpipes (more than you'll see anywhere else in one day) and the church groups will march and the the TV stations will all send their talking heads to get video clips and try to say something clever. The weather, based on experience, will be somewhere between frigid and balmy, somewhere between snow flurries and bright sunshine. Somewhere. From the humble beginnings in 1979 as a kids' bike parade, this is arguably the biggest and most joyful neighborhood party in the world.
We've attended many of these, more of these than I can recall, and truthfully, they all look tend to look pretty much the same, anyway. But the highlights of the parades we attended, those are unique and wonderful, and they get better as the years go by.
We always celebrated this with Jimmy the Cop and his family. Their first home, on Oakley, just south of 102nd, was a block from the start of the parade route. That was such a beautiful little house, and it was filled with love and smiles! We'd have to arrive a few hours before the parade in order to get a place to park, as the neighborhood went into lockdown gridlock an hour or two before the parade began. Jimmy was either on his second or third beer or still sleeping or in the shower when we'd arrive, you never knew what to expect.
The first year, we plopped tiny little Tommy in his stroller atop the case of Miller Lite that was concealed beneath a baby blanket and headed off. Tommy's role as beer smuggler would be handed off after a few years to his baby sister, Alyssa (my godchild), then to my son when he was the smallest. A family tradition, this, the wee ones running hooch for their dads. The first year it rained, and Jimmy and I --and the stroller-- finished the parade alone under the bus shelter on the corner of 103rd.
In later years, the stroller was replaced. Jimmy's pal, John, another cop, would stake out a vantage point with his wife's mini-van, parking it there the night before, usually by the Dunkin' Donuts at 104th Street. This became the gathering point for dozens and dozens of people throughout the day, mostly policemen. The wall in the alley behind became a comfort station, and it was here that young Tom was taught how to pee outside. His mother, in tears of laughter, called my wife a couple of days after the parade to recount how young Tom had adapted his new knowledge and was heading out to the back yard every few hours to pee off the backyard deck.
A few years later, the parade became a romantic site. My eldest, in a great conspiracy with the entire family, rented kilts and was given a perch atop the Fraternal Order of Police float, along with a stout dose of Jack Daniels for warmth and courage. When the float arrived at our vantage point, an waiting policeman strode purposefully into the middle of the street and commanded the parade traffic to halt. As thousands of watched in amazement, the lad produced a "Will You Marry Me?" sign and bent to a knee right in the middle of Western Avenue. Oooh's and aaahhhh's filled the air as the ladies handed the future bride a sign that said yes on one side and no on the other and propelled her off the curb and into the street, where she accepted as the crowd let forth a roar. The newly engaged pair climbed back on the float, the officer dutifully admonished the float driver to get moving --"yer holdin' everything up!"-- and the kids were celebrities for a day. The lad's proposal gambit has been copied by many since then.
The post-parade parties began with just our families in the little dining room in the beautiful house on Oakley, and rapidly grew to totally unmanageable proportions over the years. Jimmy has a habit of getting to know people, getting to know everyone, actually, and with proper libations he becomes highly social. One year, when the party was already getting big and was now headquartered down in the basement, Jimmy brought back most of the New York City police department to the party. Jimmy's spouse took most everything that her husband did with amazing grace and unrelenting good nature, until the N.Y. guests invited some apparently professional amorous escorts, and there was only one bathroom downstairs and they were in there and the kids had to pee (lot of that associated with the parade, peeing, that is) and Jimmy's wife decided she'd had enough and announced that she was heading to her mother's andshe was letting Jimmy sort out the houseful of guests. While he didn't immediately get the point, his judgement slowed at the time by a grand measure of green beer, eventually the notion of consequences became a bit clearer and the guest list was trimmed.
Jimmy and his wife moved to a bigger house after a few years, on Fairfield just north of 107th. The post-parade parties migrated with them, but the random invited guests (and the NYC coppers and their escorts) stopped receiving invitations. Something to do, as I recall, with that incident in the basement bathroom. We'd begun to arrive even earlier, as the parade's popularity was growing each year, and gridlock was occuring earlier each year, and there would be Jimmy's wife, Tricia, cooking corned beef briskets like she was preparing to feed an army, which, in a manner of speaking, she was. Jimmy would be having a beer, or sleeping, or showering, just as before, but there was a family theme firmly in place again, Trish's orders.
These were my best parade days, when I quit actually going to the parade, as I had long since tired of the crowds and had seen the show enough times, and I would stay back and slice corned beef for Tricia with her big old carving knife for hours, stacking up enormous trays that would be picked clean as soon as the parade ended. Tricia was simply amazing at this, putting on this enormous party for a collection of friends, family, neighborhood kids, friends of friends, an astounding assortment of people who would show up, some occasionally with an addition to the table, most not, and everyone ate and drank and laughed at the house on Fairfield, like they had at the house on Oakley, buzzed with friendship and festivity and green beer, as did hundreds other houses all over the Beverly neighborhood.
And just it was always Jimmy who was bigger than life in the middle of all this, it was always Tricia who was the elegant, smiling hostess, opening her home and her heart to everyone, long time friends and casual acquaintances alike.
One year, Tricia and my wife, neither of whom could hold their liquor one iota, decided they were going to be more an active part of the revelry than was their custom, and they did some damage to a bottle of Bailey's, or wine, or both, I don't remember. Watching the two of them giggling and slurring their words and babbling at each other, it was simply priceless.
The kids got older and bigger and the parades kept coming to mark the arrival of another spring and the little events that stood out made me laugh even more, like when Jimmy informed his brothers-in-law that the whiskey bottles were in the kitchen cabinet and the bottles were off limits and he would personally shoot the first nitwit who tried to liberate the bottles. No one was sure if he was serious, and his wife just smiled and went about being a gracious hostess, explaining that her mother would be so upset if Jimmy had to shoot "the boys".
When parade #30, steps off this Sunday, there will be hundreds of thousands of spectators, probably a new record if anybody could actually count, and hundreds of post-parade family gatherings will enliven the neighborhood. We'll be nowhere near. Our ever graceful friend Tricia lost her battle against breast cancer, three years it's been now, and the parade isn't the same anymore. I don't slice a hundred pounds of corned beef anymore, and we don't stand smiling at the wail of the kilty bands anymore, and the imitators doing their mostly dreadful renditions of "South Side Irish" don't sound like fun anymore.
But we had a damned good time for a long time, and we'll remember and miss Tricia a longer time still.
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