I made kind of an effort for St. Patrick’s Day yesterday, which is unusual for me.  I certainly don’t object to it — what’s not to like about beer, parades, and shooing out snakes?  I’ve celebrated it, of course, but I’ve never had any particular affection for the day.  I’m not Irish and while there were plenty of Irish folks in the town in which I grew up, the ambiance  of my home town (if my home town can be said to have “ambiance”) was more Eastern European and Italian.

But my mother-in-law was Irish, child of Irish immigrants and a product of New York’s lower East Side.  She was very proud of both of those things.  She wore a lot of green and she taught her sons those old Irish songs, all of which sound so sad to me.  At her funeral in January, they sang “Danny Boy.”  Everyone cried.  How could you not?

It was not an unexpected death, although it’s always sad to lose a parent.  And it’s funny how you know someone for a while and you think of them as fully formed when you first met them, even if it was over 20 years ago.  You don’t know how they grew up or what kind of young person they were, you don’t know what is was like to be the child of an abusive father or a single mother or the Depression.  You don’t know how they came to be strong, or charming, or how they found the resilience to take their first trip out of the country to India with two small boys in the 1950s when international travel was a real adventure and not just eight or ten hours in a full-flat seat in business class.

After my mother-in-law died, my daughter and I spent an afternoon in her apartment going through her photo albums and looking for pictures of her to put on a poster board for her funeral.  We found her high school graduation picture, her wedding picture, pictures of her with her sister during WWII.  We found pictures of her with Warren Beatty and the pope.  We found pictures of her in India, Poland, Switzerland, Rome, on ocean liners and airplanes. We found pictures of her with her grandchildren, and her friends, and her mother.

It occurred to me that we think we know the people we see every day or every week, the people we grow up with who are as familiar to us as our own faces in a mirror.  But we don’t.  The poster board with the pictures of my mother-in-law is still in my living room and every time I pass it I am reminded that we really don’t know people at all, even the people we love the most.

So yesterday I bought soda bread and green bagels for my children.  I braised chicken with a nice porter  and I made my version of colcannon — mashed potatoes with cabbage and onions I sauteed in butter.  In honor of a woman I thought I knew but didn’t.