soulsearchingSt Paddy's Day. Everybody's Irish. My Irish sister called to wish me top of the mornin'. Apparently my father used to talk with a brogue when he was tipsy, so my mother always freaked out when I would lapse into a brogue. One of my son's brogues when he's three sheets to the wind. Jansenistic Irish were big on mea culpa. Perhaps that is why my soul was so black during my childhood-teen age years...Oh they had great stories such as: Extra Ecclessia nullus salus= outside the church there is no salvation; this lead to it was a mortal sin to darken the doors of a Protestant church. And so on a Sunday afternoon when my sister and I entered the chapel of Trinity College we were at Hell's gates. I don't believe I ever confessed that sin. Perhaps the priest would have straightened me out. Fear was big and ugly and in all dark places, lurking behind a door drifting along with an impure thought...I remember a St Patrick's day which stretched into St Joseph's day when I was in Turkey. Magnums, and Jerryboms of champagne, and a protestant girl missionary who came home with me and bundled ,but we did not fuck. Before she left, she hung my trousers from the top bureau drawer, and took the cuff links out of my french cuffs. Left the change on the bureau along with the keys and went about God's good work among the heathen.