Not Much to Hyphenate

When Irish eyes are smilin'....St. Patty's Day 2010, five weeks home from Ethiopia

 
There's been a lot of chatter on a certain adoption board lately -- instigated unwittingly by me with a question regarding a school assignment -- about whether our children vicariously inherit our cultural heritage. Does a little boy from Ethiopia who is adopted by a Jewish family from the Bronx, for instance, become culturally Jewish? Or does he maintain his Ethiopian cultural heritage? What does he consider to be his past, and who are his ancestors? Does he have two sets -- one from Ethiopia and one from wherever in the world the adoptive parents' ancestors hailed from? Is he Jewish-American or Ethiopian-American? Or both?

Both S's and my families have been in the United States too long to have retained any hyphenated cultural identity. S has to look up what county his family supposedly came from in Ireland -- neither of us can ever remember it. If there's family back in the home country, they're long lost, very distant relatives. His biological children didn't take Irish step dancing lessons and they weren't even baptized -- let alone raised -- in the Catholic church. And no one bakes Irish soda bread for St. Patrick's Day.

My English-heritage grandmother used to make plum pudding with hard sauce for Christmas, and lamb with mint jelly for Easter -- no one has kept up with either tradition. My German-heritage father -- it is instructive to note that the German side of my family arrived in this country shortly before WWI, hence they deliberately downplayed their German-ness, even changing from their Bavarian Catholicism to Protestantism to fit in with their rural upstate New York community -- used to make homemade noodles to accompany his pot roast and gravy. That was about all that came down to us from our German roots -- except the German temper. As a vegetarian, the pot roast and gravy is out  for me, and my couple of stabs at his homemade noodle recipe turned out as colossal failures. I'm much better with Ethiopian cooking than I am with cooking from my own background.

No, we don't have much to pass down to T that's come down to us in terms of our cultural identity. Other than wearing green on St. Patrick's day  - which is an American tradition, not an Irish one -- we don't do very much that's worthy of country-of-origin hyphenation. My homemade Boston style baked beans are the closest I have to anything that's culturally traditional -- and that is very much a New World tradition. Perhaps when your family has been in one country for almost 400 years, that becomes the country you identify with. I'm not English-American, Scottish-American, or German-American. Despite where I live and despite the fact that my father's family made their way to New York's Southern Tier via Pennsylvania, I see myself as thoroughly New England-American.

That said, I did pay homage to my Scottish roots by being piped down the aisle at our wedding. S's oldest daughter was horrified -- she can't stand the sound of bagpipes. "How can you call yourself Irish?" was our mock equally-horrified response, but understanding that her Irish-ness is something that pretty much exists in her middle and last names only.

I tried to have a piper hired for my father's funeral, but my mother, the one with the English heritage, refused -- and she did have the right of first refusal, I suppose. The family lore does have one of her ancestors as jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, so I suppose genetically she's programmed against the call of the pipes. Maybe one day I'll hire a piper to meet me at the cemetery and do it clandestinely, or as clandestinely as one can be with bagpipes. I've told everyone I can think of that there better be a piper -- in a Scottish kilt -- at my funeral and he or she better play Amazing Grace.

But what about T? Will the pipes call to him? Who am I to say and how am I to know? I have threatened to sign him up for Irish step dancing. He's a perpetual motion machine -- what better activity? And he does have the last name, after all.

Before we had T in our lives, we'd hoped to travel back to the "British" isles to visit the various homelands -- Ireland, the Isle of Wight, Scotland. Ben Nevis beckons me. Now our next overseas trip is likely to be Ethiopia, and that's OK. But according to T, it's going to have to wait until after his trip to Disney World. Our injera-eating boy is indeed becoming an All-American kid.

"Mairi's Wedding" -- what I walked down the aisle to. 

"The Water is Wide" -- also part of our ceremony 

And Just for Kicks: "Mull of Kintyre": I was at a Paul McCartney concert in Toronto back in the 90s. He played this song, and at the appropriate time a huge official Royal-something Canadian pipe band made its entrance from both sides of the stage. There must have been a hundred pipers -- it was one of the most magical concert moments I ever experienced. It still makes my hair stand up on end to think about it.