Today, I engaged in yet another experiment in finding just the right hair color and length and style for my current life. My dog adoption this past summer prompted enormous changes in my life. First I had to hire trainers for the dog, then I had to buy and install temporary fencing (she is an escape artist and my old back fence was no match) and I have been experimenting with shoes - no success so far, because she MUST be walked twice a day no matter the weather or my state of mind or body. Same with hair.
Last summer, because we had to walk in the neighborhood due to my newly (then) adopted dog's nervousness and aggression towards others and esp. other dogs in the park, I had to get a short hair cut. It was HOT in the neighborhood because my neighbors have all cut down their trees and shade is scarce, not like the park where there is plenty of shade and cooler walks. So I cut my hair shorter and shorter. Nothing came out quite right after I had to shampoo and style it myself, until today.
Today, at the Cutting Room, where I have for 2 or 3 or more years had the BEST hair color and style anyone could wish for, I got the hair-cut and style that works perfectly - not too short, not too long, not in my face or eyes. And the funny, chatty, and talented young women who gave me this great hair-cut were both Irish! The shampoo woman, told me her father is Irish but they don't know anything about their family history because his father died when he was a small child, however, she said many people with her last name come into the shop and she always wonders if they are related.
We talked about the Immigration Station in Gloucester City where the Irish fleeing the famine in Ireland in the middle of the 1800's, were sent when Philadelphia couldn't take any more. They sent the ships across the river to what was, actually, an Irish settlement from the beginning. Irish Quakers from the Newton Colony settled Gloucester, their pact was made at Proprietor's Park and they are buried in Collingswood at what was the Irish cemetery near the train tracks. When the Newton Quaker Colony moved to Camden, they took some of the headstones with them but the historians protested and the stones were brought back and put into a heap inside a stone wall in the cemetery at the eastern end of the park.
My stylist today, Meghan, comes from a huge Irish family of 13 children on her father's side, 7 on her mother's and they all celebrate together in what was her grandmother's house and which she bought when her grandmother died.
My big half Irish family has scattered over the years. My mother's side were Irish, my father's side were English and German. As the grandparents died and then the parents, we all drifted off and even my own siblings rarely get together, geographically distant as we are.
Tomorrow, however I will celebrate St. Patrick's Day with my old teaching friends at the Phily Diner on the Black Horse Pike, with my new hair cut and my St. Patrick's Day green shirt emblazoned with sparkling shamrocks. I used to call my Irish grandmother on the phone and sing "When Irish eyes are smiling," to her not that she put much store in sentiment or the American version of "Irishness" - she was a serious woman.
My two grandmothers could not have been more different. The maternal Irish one was pale, quiet, serious and kept to herself - no stories from her. The German one was cheery and robust, outgoing, and social, and full of stories, but not much family history. I wish I had known to ask them more.
When I was just beginning my career i teaching, back in the 1980's, oral history and family history made a big resurgence. At teachers' conventions each year, there would be workshops on it and so I took to interviewing my grandmothers about their personal histories, but they were not terribly forthcoming and I was not gifted enough in the art to pull out the information.
Over the years since, I have done a bit of family history research with the help of ancestry.com and I have even been to each of the countries of my family origin - England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. So has my own daughter.
Whether you are are Irish or not, it is a good day to celebrate our ancestors and what they suffered to get us where we are! Happy St. Patrick's Day to you! And here's hoping the Brexit idiocy doesn't strart up the border war in Ireland again!
Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
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