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!
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