I don’t know how Irish I am. Everybody seems to be, at least a little bit —- which goes to show them Irish got around.
Anyway, me and my in-laws, the Gunches, always celebrate St. Patrick’s Day big time. We are all Catholic and this is the only time before Easter we eat whatever we gave up for Lent.
Last year, my sister-in-law Gladiola invited us all to her house for a big corned beef and cabbage dinner and green cake.
Now, Gloriosa married rich and she lives in a big house Uptown — which is right next door to her in-laws, unfortunately. The father-in-law ain’t too bad, but the mother-in-law, Ms. Sarcophaga, is something else again. She never stops bringing up the time she was eating at Gloriosa’s and had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Hmph. Nobody told her to eat the potpourri.
Anyways, Gloriosa is rushing around getting corn beef and cabbage cooked and the biscuit mix mixed, and she don’t notice her son Rex, who is 13, walking around the kitchen adding green food coloring to everything.
Not until the Gunches are all there and her own mother, Ms. Larda, peeks into the pot, does anyone realize the food is all khaki colored. I guess Rex should have used more food coloring. Even the biscuits are khaki.
It don’t look appetizing at all. More like revolting. Everybody crowds into the kitchen and is standing around looking at this food, trying to think about how to excuse themselves and beeline for a McDonald’s, when Ms. Larda takes charge. “Everybody got sunglasses with them?” Everybody does. She says, “With sunglasses on, this stuff looks pretty good. And it tastes delicious. So let’s eat.”
And she is right. We are all sitting around in our sunglasses, actually enjoying ourselves —even baby Flambeau, in her little Sesame Street sunglasses — when Ms. Sarcophaga slithers in the back door, fashionably late. (She always does this real quiet, hoping to hear something that will make for juicy gossip.) But then she peeks around the door frame and sees us all sitting around wearing sunglasses eating khaki food and she quick slithers right back out.
She rushes to tell her husband, who is just about to walk over. “We’ll just say we forgot we were invited,” she says. “I think they’ve all gone crazy.”
We are just finishing up and taking off our sunglasses when Gloriosa’s husband, Proteus, realizes his parents didn’t show up.
Well, there’s hardly anything left, and Proteus can only imagine his mother’s reaction to a khaki dinner anyway. He and Gloriosa wring their hands for awhile and then she remembers that a restaurant a few blocks away is advertising a St. Patrick’s Day special. So he rushes over there, picks up a couple of orders, then comes back. They transfer the food to Gloriosa’s nice plates, wrap them in aluminum foil, and he takes them next door.
He asks his mother if she forgot about their Irish dinner. She starts to make up a story, then stops, and says yes, they did. He sets the plates on her table and says “Enjoy!”
She says, “Well, we’ll try, but you know we aren’t Irish.”
That’s the kind of thing she always says instead of ‘Thank you.’
She calls her husband and says, “Look at what they want us to eat!” and pulls off the aluminum foil.
“It looks delicious,” he says, and sits down. “Hand me a fork. Do we have a bottle of Guinness in the fridge?”
Ms. Sarcophaga hands him a fork and slams a bottle of Guinness down on the table.
Then she goes off to make a appointment with the eye doctor.
