In March 2009 I was sleeping off a hangover on the back bench of an Irish Greyhound-type bus en route from Galway to Cork when my friends shook/shouted me awake.
“They cancelled the South Side Irish Parade,” they told me.
I processed this for a moment and finally said, “I’m miserable already. You woke me up to tell me that?” I rolled over and fell back asleep.
People of Irish descent living on the South Side (especially the far Southwest Side) of Chicago have been throwing their own St. Patrick’s Day parade for four decades. We like to think that it is wildly distinct from the Saturday parade downtown. It feels intimate (though it drew an estimated 300,000 the year before it was first cancelled.)
As a kid at the parade, you take in the bagpipes and Irish dance routines and catch candy from green-clad participants with smiling Irish eyes, and maybe some years you’re even invited to march if your family is connected to some union or charitable organization.
As a high-schooler, you congregate in terrifyingly large teenage hordes along the route and sip Coors Light which you’ve cleverly disguised within an extra-large Mr. Sub fountain cup.
As a young adult, your friends’ parents finally stop “looking the other way” at your debauchery, and you realize they’ve always been as drunk as you were on this day, and you all sing “Courtin’ In The Kitchen” by the Clancy Brothers together over a folding table of corned beef and Jameson.
These specific examples apply to everybody, I presume.
As of that bus trip in Ireland, when I heard about the cancellation, I had not missed a South Side Irish parade my entire life.
That was eleven years ago. Now, I understand that this is the first entry in series that promises to be about what was going on precisely ten years ago, but, (a) back off, and (b) bear with me.
So that was the first time the South Side Irish Parade was cancelled. The next time would be the following year, which, at the time of this writing, was ten years ago. See? I got to it.
In a 3/15/2010 Chicago Sun-Times article, Mark Konkol explained that the parade was cancelled for a second year in a row due to “rowdy and drunken behavior by some revelers.” He quoted Chicago Police Commander Michael Kuemeth, who really tossed some extra spicy giardiniera onto his description of that justification, citing “the lawless behavior that ruined the parade.”
Welp, the parade has been ruined one again, but not by the antics of those (we?) drunken Southside micks. It was ruined by the Coronavirus.
This unequivocally horrifying global pandemic has ruined lots of things: my income, everybody’s social life, sports, my wife’s income… the list goes on.
Let’s jump back ten years, because I think that’s the whole thing I’m doing here. (Look, it’ll be a while before I get the hang of this.) On March 17, 2010, writing in the Chicago Tribune, Peter Cameron reported that while a vaccination for the H1N1 virus, colloquially referred to as the “swine flu,” had been made widely available to Americans for free, “many health departments are having trouble giving away their remaining stock -- some of which might have to be thrown out.”
That’s right. A decade ago, a vaccine for a virus that ultimately killed over 12,000 Americans was like a flyer for a local improv show: they couldn’t even give it away.
For my part, I was even worse than the churchgoing folks in that article who casually refused the vaccine.
(Ok. I’m about to tell another story from eleven years ago. Maybe I should just shift the whole focus of this project to eleven years ago. I don’t know. I’m sorry.)
During my senior year of college, my friends and I hosted a “Swine-Flu-B-Q,” a cookout at which we exclusively served pork products. The idea was that we had encountered misinformation (that’s Olde English for “fake news”) claiming that one could contract the H1N1 virus by eating pig meat, and so the pork industry was needlessly suffering economically, and so we wanted to give them a boost and alter public awareness by purchasing and ingesting a disgusting amount of sausage, bacon, ribs, you name it.
We took that global, news-cycle dominating virus so unseriously that not only did we make jokes about it, we spent money and charcoal and man-hours to turn an entire day into a joke about it. Conversely, I’ve spent the past week glued to cable news, like an old person, hoping to hear anything about a possible Coronavirus vaccine.
Ok, that was eleven years ago. What was I up to this week ten years ago? Serendipitously, I happened to write a blog on 3-17-2010 detailing just that. Here’s an excerpt!
“The scents of peppermint and tobacco now ran through my breath, and this is exactly the combination of scents attributed to the grandfather in the original "Parent Trap". I smelled the way an early 1960's old man smelled. I was happy to smell this way, as I strolled along Lawndale Avenue, the sun sneaking in past the edges of my brown sunglasses, and my dog panting laboriously as she pulled at her leash.”
Funny thing about my Coronavirus self-quarantine: smoking cigars and walking my dogs are my only two outdoor indulgences. Turns out I deal with an unspeakably terrifying worldwide viral outbreak the same way I dealt with being an unemployed college dropout living in my mom’s basement ten years ago: Smoke a cigar, walk a dog, write things on the internet.
A clarification to the “unemployed” descriptor I just gave 21-year-old me: I accepted a sales associate position at Macy’s the very week I wrote that blog post. I had dropped out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rather abruptly, so I took the first job I could get. I was selling premium (read: overpriced) men’s denim at the Macy’s in Water Tower Place, so the job got me out of the South Side a few days a week, and put enough money in my pocket to eventually get me an apartment about a mile north of Wrigley Field. I had no degree and no plan, but I had a steady paycheck and a reason to get out of the house.
Today, I have a degree. I finally got my diploma last month after a decade of half-heartedly chipping away. And I technically have a job as a bartender. But, because all Louisiana restaurants have been shut down due to the Coronavirus, I have no steady paycheck. Not only do I have no reason to leave the house, I’m strongly discouraged by government officials and society-at-large to do so. So I need the cigars and pooches and blank page (and the wife and Nintendo Wii and red wine) more than ever.
Sunday would have been the day of this year’s South Side Irish Parade. I haven’t been to one since my wife Ali and I moved to New Orleans in 2015, and I normally wake up that day feeling like I’m missing Christmas. This year, as I sang along to a Dubliners live album while sipping Guinness and selecting from my closet a green Milwaukee Irish Fest polo and some brown tweed trousers, I pictured all the South Siders back home who were probably listening to and drinking and wearing stuff similar to mine, but who, despite the parade being cancelled and the growing trend of social distancing, would undoubtedly still be flooding the bars on Western Avenue, clinking pints and shots and embracing as they chugged, or huddling around dining room tables overflowing with trays of corned beef and rye bread, everyone helping themselves with bare hands.
But, as was the case with the apathetic H1N1 risk-takers, my own behavior on Sunday was not without blemish. With a corned beef needing more time in our Crock Pot, and New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell failing to weigh in on whether it was still ok for a healthy young couple to go out for happy hour margaritas, we took the mayor’s silence as a go-ahead.
Arriving at La Casita, we exchanged pleasantries with our usual bartender, but it was one of those instances where when you tell someone you’re doing “alright,” you look them in the eye, sort of shake your head and shrug, and you maybe say the word “alright” a few times, indicating that you’re only as “alright” as one could be right now. Other than that, the scene was bizarrely normal. We had a few margs and some guac, the waitstaff was upbeat, and a pregnant woman at the table next to us shared nachos with a toddler whose hands could not possibly have been sanitized.
And, you know what? I’ll leave you there. A shaded patio on a sunny day, ice cubes slowly melting into two margaritas (one with a salted rim, one without), Ali excitedly pointing out every dog that gets walked by, and only a slight inkling in the backs of our minds that this humble indulgence may be but an ephemeral privilege.
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