The History Lesson

My Irish friend Patricia has a cap of gleaming golden hair that falls attractively around her winsome features. I on the other hand sport a mud-colored frizz standing defiantly at all angles from a face that speaks less of the fairytale princess and more of the potato. I do not suppose for a second that by patronizing Patricia’s hairdresser, I will begin to look like Patricia; but Tiffany in West Hollywood is a gentle soul who does what she can with what is on top of my head, and at my stage of life, I figure that’s as much as I can ask.

“Patricia came in last week,” said Tiffany the other day as she snipped with valiant optimism at my rats’ nest tresses.

“I know she did,” I said. “I saw her yesterday and she looked lovely.”

Tiffany snipped some more and began to laugh.

“You British are so funny,” she chuckled.

“Haha,” I agreed politely, this being an observation I find I encounter with some frequency as I go about my daily round.

“You like to stick to your schedule, don’t you?” she added.

“Huh,” I affirmed, because if it pleased her to consider arriving ten minutes late for an 11.00 a.m. appointment to be sticking to a schedule, then who was I to burst her bubble?

“It happens every time,” she continued. “Patricia comes in one week and the very next week you make an appointment too. Regular as clockwork.”

“Yuh,” I explained, because while I can’t claim that Patricia and I spend coffee-fueled hours planning the co-ordination of our hairdressing appointments, I supposed it made sense that, if our hair grew at about the same rate, then it would presumably start to feel shaggy at about the same time. I wondered if our hair really did grow at the same rate? Because if so …

Back up, I then thought. Did Tiffany just describe us both as British? Now, my own national identity is something of a puzzle, even to myself: I am of Irish descent but British birth and upbringing, which makes me I have never been entirely sure which, but in the eyes of most Americans as British as Hereward the Wake. Patricia, however, is a Limerick woman, and a proud daughter of the Republic of Ireland, a nation which had never volunteered to be part of Britain in the first place, and finally was able to stop being so in 1949.

“I think it’s kind of cute,” said Tiffany.

Here was a conundrum. Tiffany is a hairdresser, not a scholar of North West European history, and it would be no more fair to expect her to recognize the intricacies of Hiberno-British relations than to ask me the difference between balayage and boiled cabbage. But the Irish nation had fought for centuries for separation from Britain, and it would be plain wrong – wrong, unjust and disloyal – for their granddaughter to let such an error go uncorrected.

“It’s good the days are getting longer,” said Tiffany. “Seems like spring’s on the way at last, right?”

I happen myself to know more than some may think altogether desirable about the history of Ireland’s struggle for independence. Fired by the zeal of the exiles’ descendant, I have studied it in depth, and, if unleashed, I can, as they say in Britain, go on a bit. I can tell you about Silken Thomas Fitzgerald, and Owen Roe O’Neill, and the Flight of the Earls in 1607, and the Siege of Drogheda in 1641, and the broken Treaty of Limerick in 1691. I can tell you about Wolfe Tone in 1798, and the Manchester Martyrs in 1867, and Pádraig Pearse and James Connolly in 1916. If your luck’s out, I can sing Kevin Barry, and Bold Robert Emmet, and A Nation Once Again. If it really isn’t your day, I might even throw in Éamonn an Chnoic. In Irish.

“Are you watching The White Lotus?” said Tiffany. “I’m kind of worried for Belinda, I hope she’s going to be OK.”

In theory, I could make my point with a brief, calm, and concise statement of fact; but then, in theory, Oliver Reed could have confined himself to just the one small sherry before dinner. Tiffany deserved better this sunny spring morning. Tiffany deserved cheerful conversation, a cry of joy at the end of the session, and a generous tip added to her bill, not a speech from which strong men have been known to flee, whimpering.

But if I said nothing, how could I look Wolfe Tone in the eye?

“Do you have any trips planned?” said Tiffany. “I know Patricia had a good time on hers.”

An agonizing choice lay before me. Which did I choose – the present good cheer of the nice woman who was cutting my hair, or justice for the memory of Ireland’s martyrs? A glum Celtic gloom began to settle over my spirit, like a Connacht mist descending on a farmer and making itself comfortable around his coat. It was impossibly disappointing, I thought, to be put into this position. Had the world, I thought despairingly, really been so slow to grasp the bitterly-fought fact of Irish independence that even after nearly a century, Tiffany might still be confusing an Irish person with a Brit? Because, while I was prepared to concede my own confused Hiberno-Londoner national identity, one thing Patricia most emphatically was not was British.

“You sometimes go to London around now,” said Tiffany. “Are you going this year?”

I took a deep breath.

“You know, Tiffany …” I began.

Then, back up again, I thought. Patricia. British. Patrisha. Briticia. There was a loud hairdryer blasting in one corner of the room, and in another a stylist was enthusiastically regaling a captive customer with the details of her purple foods only diet.

“Did you just say,” I asked, then, “that Patricia and I have the same schedule?”

Tiffany paused her scissors in surprise.

“Yeah,” she said. “You and Patricia. You always come in a week apart.”

I owed it to Patricia’s ancestors and to mine to achieve crystal clarity here.

“You said ‘You and Patricia,’” I confirmed.

“You and Patricia,” Tiffany repeated, her eyes darting just a little nervously to the side.

But with stakes such as these you could not be too meticulous.

“So you didn’t say Patricia was British,” I pursued.

Tiffany was by now looking at me in a way that some might describe as kinda funny.

“But Patricia’s not British,” she said. “She’s Irish, right? And that’s different, right?”

She paused, uncertainly, possibly just a little thrown by the fanatic gleam beaming laser-like from her client’s eye.

“It is different, right?” she asked.

And the sun shone again over Melrose Avenue.

“It certainly is,” I assured her, while somewhere in the heavens above me Silken Thomas and Pádraig Pearse and all who came before and after pumped fists of triumph into the celestial ether, and all was well with the world below.

“Tiocfaidh ár lá,” I allowed myself, since it was, after all, nearly St. Patrick’s Day.

Tiffany blinked a couple of times, picked up her scissors and resumed snipping, blissfully unaware of the fate that had so nearly befallen her.