Bell Bridge Books

Tip o’ the Hat to Murph

 by Judith Arnold

My ninth-grade English teacher was a tall, broad-faced, red-haired, vehemently Irish man named Eugene Murphy. Murph was brilliant, motivational, stern, and funny—the best teacher I had in high school. All these years later, I still remember the cadence of his coordinating-conjunctions chant, his purple-prose parodies, his explication of The Iliad and his flummoxed reaction when we all handwrote our Iliad essays in spirals so he’d have to rotate our papers to read them. I remember the day he confiscated our water pistols and then turned them on us and mowed down the entire class with spritzes of water. I remember the day he read us a short story he had written, a lovely, lyrical tale heavily influenced by James Joyce. I remember him serenading us with “Danny Boy,” his voice a sweet, high tenor.

One reason I wound up writing for and then editing the high school newspaper was that Murph was the faculty advisor. I didn’t want to lose the chance to work with him once I’d finished ninth grade.

Not surprisingly, Murph took St. Patrick’s Day very seriously. My senior year, the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City coincided with an awards luncheon for high school newspapers at the Waldorf-Astoria. Our school newspaper had won some sort of recognition from the Columbia University School of Journalism, and Murph piled the newspaper’s senior editors into his car and drove us into Manhattan so we could receive our award.

I don’t remember much about the award or the luncheon. What I do remember was that we arrived in the city hours before the luncheon so we could view the St. Patrick’s Day parade first. I recall little about the parade itself—a parade is a parade—but everything about Murph that day. He wore a necktie festooned with shamrocks, and balanced a kelly-green derby precariously atop his red hair. He waved at the marchers. He sang. He cheered. He made me wish I was Irish.

I am not Irish. I come from Eastern European Jewish stock, and I’m as proud of my heritage as Murph was of his. And so, the following Monday, I brought Murph a St. Patrick’s Day present: a square of matzo painted green.

Tears glistened in Murph’s eyes when he opened the box and saw that bright green matzo. Whether they were tears of joy or horror, I can’t say. I did warn him not to eat the matzo, because I’d used real paint, not food coloring. Perhaps his tears arose from disappointment over not being able to snack on my gift.

I kept in touch with Murph for years after I graduated from high school. He was my mentor, my inspiration. He definitely deserves some of the credit for my career as a novelist. Never does a St. Patrick’s Day go by when I don’t summon a memory of him standing on that crowded sidewalk on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, wearing a tacky green derby and singing “McNamara’s Band” as the parade passed by.

CELEBRATE EVERYTHING GREEN (PAINTED OR NOT) THIS ST. PATRICK’S DAY!

AND DON’T FORGET TO GRAB DEAD BALL BY JUDITH ARNOLD FROM AMAZON TODAY! 

JUST CLICK THE LINK!

Three-Leaf Weeds

by Kimberly Brock

I’m not Irish. Not even close. I don’t even look good in green. But there’s something that gets to me every spring when St. Patrick’s Day rolls around – this whole business of luck. I don’t have it. I want to know how to get it. And I’m starting to worry maybe I just missed the turn on the way to my pot of gold.

People will put ridiculous amounts of faith in luck. They’ll latch on to just about any old thing and then claim it to be lucky. There’s the luck of the Irish. Blind luck. Lucky pennies. Lucky horseshoes. Lucky numbers. Lucky socks or shoes or hats or garter belts. Lucky stars. But even with these endless options, I’ve never really been lucky. I don’t stumble upon opportunity or trip over good fortune. I don’t win at slots. I never scratched off a game card and got the Free Big Mac Meal. I never met Ed McMahon at my front door in curlers to receive my Publisher’s Clearinghouse millions. But this stuff happens. Out of the clear blue, it seems, there’s luck. So, maybe people who love the idea of luck are in fact, actually, lucky. Maybe it’s real enough, not just coincidence. But – and this is not because I’m green with envy – I’m starting to think luck might be a lot more than, well, dumb.

I married a man who can find a four-leaf clover without fail. It’s a wonder to behold, how that taciturn man can walk onto any patch of grass, bow his quiet head, and call up a little miracle. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he creates them out of the wishes of his heart. To tell you the truth, I am suspicious of his methods. There’s something annoying about the fact that I can stomp all over that same little patch for hours and all I’ll see is grass and the most ordinary three-leaf weeds on earth. I resent it, if you want to know the truth. I put in the effort. I crouch and squat and squint until my back aches and my head is dizzy and in the end, I have nothing to show for it but a bad attitude. He, on the other hand, waltzes along, whistles, even. He will hardly glance at the ground, just plucking up little bouquets of blessings. He finds them so easily, he doesn’t even care to just give them all to me. Now, what is that? Is that luck?

So, finally, one day I said, It’s not fair. You don’t even have to try. I asked him how he did it. He smiled. And this is what I’ll think about this spring when the stout little leprechauns start trotting around, measuring their shillelagh sticks. He gave me a handful of clover and said, Maybe you’re just looking so hard you can’t see what’s right in front of you.

And that’s when I realized, my luck isn’t Irish at all. He’s German.

Check out Kimberly Brock’s novel – THE RIVER WITCH – on Amazon today! 

Just click the link! 

WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SMILING

by Mary Strand

From a certain perspective, I grew up in an Irish household.

This is pretty funny, actually, since I’m only 1/8 Irish and half Norwegian.  My mom was 1/4 Irish but, not being a math person, thought of herself as 110-percent Irish.  This mostly meant that she tended to lead the wailing on “Danny Boy” and sang the loudest on “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” the latter possibly with the assistance of Irish whiskey, and she had a penchant for giving her kids names like Brian, Sheila, and Patrick.  My dad had little say in the matter, but he sighed a lot.

I followed in my mom’s footsteps, but mostly just on St. Patrick’s Day.  In college this meant green beer, lots of it, and dancing Irish jigs to any song, most of those songs entirely inappropriate to an Irish jig, especially since the bar where we performed these jigs was a disco bar.  (Don’t blame me.  Blame the late 1970s.)  In law school my so-called Irish self and I spent St. Patrick’s Day in one of the Irish pubs a block or two from Georgetown, on Capitol Hill.  I was kicked out of one of them one year.  For an Irish lass, it was a proud moment.

Next thing I knew, I was married and practicing law, and St. Patrick’s Day became yet another day of work or, in a wild moment, a civilized dinner of corned beef and cabbage.  No more green beer.  No more getting kicked out of anywhere.  No more Irish jigs.

And then, one year, kidlet # 1 was born.  Due on Easter, he arrived four weeks early (bless his little 1/16 Irish heart) on St. Patrick’s Day.  My mom insisted he be named Patrick.  Tom and I had long since named both of the kids we were to have, and Patrick wasn’t in the mix.  My mom declared, mournfully, that I had failed her and all of Ireland.  These things happen.

Ever since, St. Patrick’s Day has been all about kidlet # 1.  His lifelong favorite color is green, but he has no interest in corned beef, cabbage, Irish soda bread, or (so far) green beer, and he calls the shots on his birthday.  As a result, my wild St. Patrick’s Days have become a distant memory.  One of my brothers, who remains as 110-percent Irish as my mom was, calls me every year to explain that he might not be able to come to kidlet # 1’s birthday dinner, because, gee, it falls on St. Patrick’s Day.

Yes, it does.  And it will next year, too.  But now we celebrate a more important holiday:  my son’s birthday.  Still, I’ll always have a fond spot in my 1/8 Irish heart for St. Patrick’s Day and my mom’s favorite Irish blessing, embroidered on a decorative pillow:

May those that love us, love us.
And those that don’t, may God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn’t turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles
So we’ll know them by their limping.

LET YOUR IRISH EYES SMILE ON MARY STRAND’S ROMANCE NOVEL – COOPER’S FOLLY.

HEAD ON OVER TO AMAZON AND GRAB IT TODAY! JUST CLICK THE LINK!