March 17th and there is no corned beef in the fridge. Yay! I am not fond of it. Nor do I care for boiled cabbage. However, that's what we had for dinner every St. Patrick's Day when I was a kid. You'd think I would have embraced corned beef and cabbage, since according to 23 and Me I am 64% Irish and English, but no. [Not sure why English and Irish is linked together in 23andMe but genetically the two must be indistinguishable; fascinating, given their stormy history, but then again all families fight..]
St. Patrick's Day actually has great significance at my house because it's the anniversary of the day in 1956 when my parents met, at a St. Patrick's Day party. [The photo below was made months later.]
My father told me many years later that the first time he saw my mother he knew he was going to marry her. Mom says basically the same thing, although she wasn't too impressed with Dad that night. She went to the party alone, and Dad was talking to the hostess' father when Mom got there, and he wouldn't leave the kitchen and go out to meet Mom. She went back to the kitchen and said hello eventually.
Mom was 22 years old and Dad was 25.
They were married less than a year later.
If there had been no St. Patrick's Day party, what would have happened?! Well, Mom was dating a guy named Bell who was quite a bit shorter than Dad, so likely my name would be Bell and I would be much shorter than my majestic height of 5'3...
The irony of it is that Mom and Dad's paths had crossed before.
In the summer of 1937 or 38 my grandfather was managing a baseball team in Cordele, Georgia. One of the players on that team, Woody, was married to Dad's cousin Fleta. Mamaw and Papaw were living in a boardinghouse that summer and Fleta would sometimes babysit for my mother, who was about 4 years old. Since my Thompson grandfather was from Cordele, trips there during the summer were common for my father's family, and undoubtedly they went to a baseball game where Fleta's husband Woody was playing. If 8 year old Dad saw 4 year old Mom I doubt there were any sparks.
At the University of Georgia years later, Dad was in graduate school when Mom was a freshman, and he had a job in the Psychology Department testing freshmen, so it's likely their paths crossed there, too. The school was not nearly as big in 1952 as it was when I went there many years later.
So it's possible when they formally "met" in 1956 that Mom and Dad simply recognized each other from earlier encounters. Who knows. Doesn't matter. They were married nearly 40 years, until my dad died in 1996.
Dad still seems to be around, though, in spirit. A few days ago he woke Mom up at 6 a.m. shouting "BOOTS IN SADDLES! TIME TO GET UP! WE'RE BURNING DAYLIGHT!" - the sweet phrase he used to awaken me and my brother our entire lives, every morning.
Mom still dreams of Dad sometimes. I do too, on occasion. He is still around, I am sure of it, in spirit.
Happy St. Paddy's Day, Dad!
Elva in 1955
Dad in 1952, in Europe
Mom and Dad about 1980
