Jenifer’s Journal: Mr. Lambert’s cake

There are only two kinds of people in the world . The Irish and those who wish they were.— Old Irish saying.

My mother always used to say that on St. Patrick’s Day, everyone was Irish.

My nuclear family is kind of white bread, Swedish-Finn on my father’s side and a Celtic combo-platter of Scottish and Welsh on my mother’s, with Irish being conspicuously absent.

Nevertheless, on St. Paddy’s Day morn there were shamrocks drawn on paper napkins atop the kitchen table and green milk for the Cheerios. We all went off to school wearing at least one green article of clothing.

Though the roots of the ritual are lost to the mists of time, somehow my older brother and I were charged, first him, then me, with a sacred responsibility performed at the Roslyn Heights Elementary School every year on March 17.

See, March 17 was not only St. Patrick’s Day, but also the birthday of our head custodian, Mr. Lambert, the embodiment of St. Patrick here on earth, or at least there, in Roslyn.

The school chorus would start brushing up its rendition of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” right after the Christmas holidays, and, on the “day,” it was our grandmother’s great honor to make Mr. Lambert’s birthday cake, although just how that honor had been bestowed upon her is still a mystery.

It was always an angel food cake fit for a saint, conservatively, 11 inches high, iced with gorgeous mint green frosting and bedight with butter cream swags piped all around — heavenly.

Yes, every March 17 until he graduated from the 6th grade, and I took over, my brother, Jon, in front of a packed auditorium, had to bear that towering, celestial confection safely across the stage and present it to the beaming birthday boy, Mr. Lambert. But what happened after I graduated 6th grade? Another enduring mystery.

In any event, with the possible exception of “Irish Spring,” I’ve found Irish boys, movies, accents, books, plays, names, sayings — in fact all things Irish — particularly appealing ever since.

For such a seemingly pallid people, the Irish are a passionate breed — so it’s no wonder there are so many poets, writers, playwrights and actors in their ranks, including James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw, to name just a few.

Those familiar masks of comedy and tragedy, Thalia and Melpomene, may be Greek in origin, but they seem to represent the essence of the Irish as no people are more gay, more witty, more effervescent in happiness, nor more despondent or broken in grief.

Describing one of his characters, the great Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats wrote, “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

Yes, that Irish essence includes flamboyant fantasies of leprechauns, lucky charms, rainbows and pots of gold juxtaposed with a history of famine, oppression, revolution and civil war, an irresistible contradiction in terms.

It may come as no surprise that I just happen to have a suggestion for you in case you’re looking for a cinematic way to celebrate your St. Patrick’s Day: Irish-American director John Ford’s 1952 film, “The Quiet Man.”

It’s a delightful example of that contradiction in action. Filmed on location in County Mayo, it boasts an Irish Cream de la crème cast, which includes John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald and Victor McLaglen.

Watching tough guy Wayne succeed in this iconic “rom-com” (though don’t worry, he’s still plenty tough) was almost as much a revelation as watching tough guy Jimmy Cagney, light-footed as any leprechaun, dancing dazzlingly through “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

The beauty of this story is that everyone in it is a little shopworn, including the townspeople, the priest, the Protestant minister, the resident grande dame. To one extent or another, each has had to carve out a hardscrabble existence against the emerald beauty of the Irish countryside. 

In real life 46 and 32 respectively, Wayne and O’Hara, star-crossed as they may seem at first, are hardly an adolescent Romeo and Juliet. When the film opens, it’s clear that both of their characters have had to learn to live with disappointment, until, of course … well, that’s why you should watch the movie.

The Irish seem to have a knack for living with both magic and misery. In his “Anam Cara — A Book of Celtic Wisdom,” John O’Donohue writes in part: “It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world awaits. A world lives within you … In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior, exterior, visible, invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together.”

I’ve baked you a column, not cake, but Happy Birthday, Mr. Lambert.