This Hurleymaker on St. Patrick's Day

One might assume that for a hurleymaker, St. Patrick’s Day would be one to celebrate, but the weeks leading up to St. Patrick’s day are not easy ones nor are they exceedingly profitable, and the day itself is a day of conflict. Wife’s birthday is on St. Patrick’s Day. How fitting you might think. An Irish American kid and a hurleymaker at that, married to an Irish American girl born on St. Patrick’s Day. And while that initially added to wife’s mystique and sense that we were destined to be together, the reality has been otherwise.  

March means march. In the weeks leading up to St. Patrick’s Day everybody  needs a hurley yesterday so they can march in a parade today. Why they absolutely need this prop I don’t know. Messages filled with sheer panic inundate my voicemail inbox from all corners of the states. We are not busy in terms of volume—I’m not blasting through my stock of blanks—rather, I’m busy making the arrangements that will get the sale done: reassuring customers, doing extra paperwork, putting in late nights to get an order ready for the next day, and making special trips to the post office to next-day air.

Meanwhile the birthday clock is ticking and as usual I have yet to secure a present for wife and have no plan for the day itself. I detest those friends and non-friends who plan birthday bonanzas for their spouses: a picnic on a mountain peak, a glass of wine in the surf at sunset, a blindfolded mystery evening, a surprise party at a choice rooftop venue. I don’t like to hear those stories. I don’t want to be friends with those people. I hate those people.

Listen to what Brant did… he is just so creative, I hear wife beam.

Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe he isn’t creative, but he has the time to sit around in an empty office all day pushing pencils thinking about such things—thinking all year about that one day he can pull off something spectacular and make all of his wife’s friends impressed and their husbands sick to their stomach. Creative? I create all day long. I make things. My mind is consumed by my creation.

St. Patrick’s Day is further complicated in that the club also has plans for me— you’ll be at this school talking to a heap of kids and don’t crack any in the head, and at this lunch talking to the old people, and you’ll be at this pub, jersey on, finding new lads to sign up. We are depending on you! The truth is I know that I will fail them. I’ll be late to my post if I get there at all. Especially if the day is March 17th.

I have tried to move the celebration of wife’s birthday to March 16^th or 18^th, or possibly the weekend before or after, but wife has always been a purist on the point of celebrating on the very day so that idea is roundly shelved.

From wife’s perspective, March 17^th can’t even be classified as anti-climax. That implies that one has had their hopes up, that one expected more and that in a twist of situational irony the day turned out differently. From wife’s perspective this cannot ever be so. She has come to expect disappointment on her birthday. It has become my job to deliver.  This may seem more than strange, but wife takes some sort of solace in knowing her pessimistic predictions are proved true.

This year’s St. Patricks Day went this way. I wake. Set out the flowers. Set out the cards. Make the coffee. Wife notices cards and flowers with wry smile, kisses kids, hopefully kisses me, goes to yoga. Wife still at yoga. Wife returns and asks for birthday plans. Smiles when she hears them in that way that says that she knows she is right about something. I am humiliated and at the same time, as mentioned before, curiously satisfied in that I proved her right. Wife roundly rejects all plans proffered. Tells me that she is inviting all of our friends (whom she put on retainer should I fail in my preparations as expected) over for dinner.  Wife goes to lunch with best friend. Comes home from lunch with a car full of groceries minus my favorite beer. I insist that I could have done the grocery shopping. She reassures me that I am not trusted to do such tasks and reminds me that most grocery stores do not welcome me on their premises for reasons I do not wish to discuss here.  

Friends come over. We eat, we drink. I sneak to the other room to look at my watch knowing I was supposed to meet clubmates at the pub hours ago. I try to look like I am enjoying myself but I know that I am emoting discomfort in ways that I cannot control. I catch wife from time to time looking at me with same wry smile.

At no predictable moment, when wife thinks I have had enough, she announces in front of the party. Okay Steve. You can go now. Our friends look on me with pity.

I must say that wife always has a good birthday because she wills it so. She makes a big joke out of the day, celebrates it on her terms, and has a laugh at my awkwardness. It is all in good fun.       

So I away to the pub where I will meet potential hurlers who are now too drunk to recruit—too fixated on the actual word hurling in their present state to move on to the discussion of the game itself.