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By Root 10376 0

Irish, shanty Irish, Padney, ain’t you the kind of an Irishman that slept with the pigs back in the old country. Once they told him his house was on fire, and he’d dashed out of the saloon and down the street with a bucket of water in his hand. It was funny watching him go, a skinny little Irishman. And while he was gone, they had all helped themselves to free beers. He came back blazing mad, picked up a hatchet, called them all the choice swear words he could think of, and ran the whole gang out into the street. Then they’d all stood on the other corner, laughing. Yeh, them was the days! And when he was a kid, they would all get sacks, wagons, any old thing, and go over to the tracks. Spike Kennedy, Lord have mercy on his soul, he was bit by a mad dog and died, would get up on one of the cars and throw coal down like sixty, and they’d scramble for it. And many’s the fight they’d have with the gangs from other streets. And many’s the plunk in the cocoanut that Paddy Lonigan got. It’s a wonder some of them weren’t kilted throwing lumps of coal and ragged rocks at each other like a band of wild Indians. To live some of those old days over again! Golly!

He took a meditative puff on his stogy, and informed himself that time was a funny thing. Old Man Time just walked along, and he didn’t even blow a How-do-you-do through his whiskers. He just walked on past you. Things just change. Chicago was nothing like it used to be, when over around St. Ignatius Church and back of the yards were white men’s neighborhoods, and Prairie Avenue was a tony street where all the swells lived, like Fields, who had a mansion at Nineteenth and Prairie, and Pullman at Eighteenth and Calumet, and Fairbanks and Potter Palmer and the niggers and whores had not roosted around Twenty-second Street, and Fifty-eighth Street was nothing but a wilderness, and on Sunday: afternoons the boulevards were lined with carriages, and there were no auto-mobiles, and living was dirt cheap, and people were friendlier and more neighborly than they now were, and there were high sidewalks, and he and Mary were young. Mary had been a pretty girl, too, and at picnics she had always won the prizes because she could run like a deer; and he remembered that first picnic he took her to, and she had won a loving cup and gave it to him, and then they went off sparking, and he had gotten his first kiss, and they sat under a tree when it was hushed, like the earth was preparing for darkness, and he and Mary had looked at each other, and then he knew he had fallen, and he didn’t give a damn. And the bicycle parties.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true,

We won’t have a stylish marriage,

We can’t afford a carriage,

But you’ll look sweet,

Upon, the seat, of a bicycle built for two.

And that Sunday he had rented a buggy, even though it cut a terrible hole in his kick, and they had driven way out south. Who would have ever thought he and she would now be living in the same neighborhood they had driven into that Sunday, and that they would have their own home, and graduate their kids from it? Now, who would have thought it? And the time he had taken her to a dance at Hull House, and coming home he had almost gotten into a mixup with some soused mick because the fellow had started to get smartalecky, like he was a-kike. Yessir, them was the days. He hummed, trying first to strike the right tune to Little Annie Rooney, then the tune of My Irish Molly ‘O. He sang to himself:

Dear old girl, the robin sings above you/

Dear old girl, it speaks of how I love you,

Dear old girl, it speaks of how I love you .. .

He couldn’t remember the rest of the song, but it was a fine song. It described his Mary to a T. His Dear Old Girl.

And the old gang. They were scattered now, to the very ends of the earth. Many of them were dead, like poor Paddy McCoy, Lord have mercy on his soul, whose ashes rested in a drunkard’s grave at Potter’s Field. Well, they were a fine gang, and many’s the good man they drank under the table, but... well, most of them didn’t turn out so well. There was Heinie Schmaltz,