St Patrick’s Day is coming up this week (March 17th) and as a kid growing up in Boston St. Paddy’s Day was a huge deal and full of fun.

The day always started with everyone trekking off to St Columbkille Church for the 9:00am Mass then we all crossed the street to the Parish Center for breakfast and Irish music and Step dancing. We never dressed up in green because we all had grandmothers and relatives living with us who grew up in Ireland and spoke Gaelic and English with a thick brogue.

It was clear we were Irish, and we knew it. Men would put a bunch of shamrocks in the band of their Donegal walking hats and I love that tradition which seems to have disappeared.

After spending time visiting the homes of our relatives and scooping up our cousins, we went down to South Boston for the parade that goes on for hours and enjoyed the food and festivities along with a whopping good dose of kid mischief added into the mix.

Many wonderful memories of all the great fun we had during those St. Paddy’s Day inspired times. When I first came up to Highland there was a pretty big parade and then the Yulan Fire Department Dinner. But for the third year there won’t be a Yulan Fire Department Corned Beef and Cabbage Dinner.

But fear not there are several of our great local restaurants that are stepping up and will be adding the famous Irish culinary staple to their menus. I spoke with Kerri Mellon the owner of Back to Bakers Restaurant and Bar and she assured me that the corned beef and cabbage dinner will be on their menu. Larry Farmer the Owner of the Lawrence Lounge in Yulan and the sponsor of the Unofficial (official) Saint Patrick’s Day Parade has some really good food and will feature the dinner as will the wonderful Kovacs family at the Yulan Country Store for their takeout dinners menu.

At D+R Garage I ran into Johnny Bouloukos from BVH Restaurant and Bar (the best sports bar in town serving their award-winning wings), and he will feature the dinner along with a live Irish Band. Johnny is of Greek descent and always has delicious Greek entrees on his menu. As the luck of the Irish would have it-there is enough of the St. Patty’s Day spirit around to see us all through.

It is with a high degree of sadness that I tell you that D+R Garage has been sold-and the site will not remain a garage/service station. After being in the business for forty years, Don and Ron are leaving, and this week is their last week at the garage-so if you have a chance stop by and wish them well.

For most of the time I have lived up here I have taken my “beater” $800 cars to them, and they kept me driving safely on the road. I once spent a whopping $7,000 for a wonderful little Suzuki 4X4 which I just loved and with their vigilant mechanical care I drove that car for nine and a half years. Then as more and more things went wrong with the car, Don sat me down and told me that I should buy a Subaru which I did, and it was only a year old and still under warrantee.

The new Subaru definitely closed the” beater car” phase of my life. When they were working on my beater cars (yes there were more than one) we sit in the station and talk, and the subject would turn to politics with Don in his Trump hat and me with my Biden t-shirt and there were opinions expressed and beliefs shared and discussion but never even a whiff of ridicule or recriminations.

Even though we lived on the opposite sides of the political spectrum and agreed on nothing I will miss our discussions and their decency. I will miss Don, Ron, Patty, and Jo.

I wish them well as they start the next chapter of their lives which I am sure won’t include getting up in the middle of the night to pull some stranded driver out of a ditch. You have my congratulations, my thanks and as my Grandmother Helen would say “slainte is tainte.”