I have always defined "The Luck of the Irish" as the surviving kind of luck, not the prospering kind of luck.
Thus if a natural disaster strikes your community and your house is destroyed and all around is chaos and woe, but you and your family are alive and well, then you have in abundance "The Luck of the Irish".
Which brings me to My Old Man who has the "Luck of the Irish" in spades.
He has survived being orphaned, the Great Depression, war, frostbite, stopping an 88mm shell with his head, seven days of coma, forty separate plastic surgical proceedures to put him back together over five years,partial deafness, partial blindness, sepsis, vino, bleeding ulcers, anemia, bouts of vertigo, skin cancer, a broken hip and now Alzheimer's disease.
Today is his birthday, he is ninety.
The famous doctors who pieced him back together after World War II have all been measured for their harps.
Somewhere in a Veteran's Hospital even as I write this, Father slurps down some ice cream.
Even with all that reckoned above, he is the only man on this breathing Earth I've ever wanted to be like.
Why?
Because he never ever let his sense of humor fail him, and never once in forty eight years did I hear him say "If Only I Hadn't Been Shot".
If you can survive all that, and laugh, well then truly you have overthrown destiny.
So happy Memorial Day, Birthday and Father's Day Dad...I can't cure Alzheimers or get you up out of that God Damned wheelchair, all I can do is write this and eat a cupcake with you tonight.
No chocolate, don't worry that much I remember.
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