[mamottawa]

Something funny happened to me last year during st-paddys, and NO its not because i had drank . I was walking down the street and some people just wished me a happy st-paddys and wondered " what part of Ireland are you from"? I was very surprised. I was born in Ottawa, Ontario and i didn'T know these people. I couldn't figure out why they'd say that.

The only explanation is maybe because of how i look ( dubious i know but still). Bright red beard( even though i have natural brown curly hair) and i happened to wear an Irish hat ( don't know what's its called though.) I just found it was funny to be "identified" by strangers hehe

M-A
Ottawa,Ontario

[TheoMark]

M-A wrote about being asked where in Ireland he came from during a St. Paddy's Day celebration. A similar (although reverse) thing happened to me a couple of years ago in Québec City. I was with a group of other "Usonians" (a term Frank Lloyd Wright used to identify folks from South of the Canadian border!). As we met several Québecois, they each addessed ME in French, and my friends in English, although we were conversing in English. It started me thinking, since it happened at least two different times during my stay there.
It happens that my a-family are Irish on my a-dad's side and French-Canadian on my a-mom's. My a-grandfather spoke French and I grew up speaking, reading, and writing (badly at present) some, much as I would have if I had remained with my French-Canadian b-mom in her native town in Rhode Island --a town that was more than 60 per cent French Canadian and strict Roman Catholic when I was born in the mid-1950s!
I hadn't really thought about ethnic heritage and family resemblance and how adoptees fit into that "puzzle" very much before that trip, since I grew up in a family of four adopted siblings, each of us of different ethnic/racial background. We knew we were Irish (the primary cultural influence--complete with extended family who emigrated from Ireland), although one of my sisters is African American (we joke about her being "Black Irish!"). In hindsight, I guess it was pretty unusual!!?

Michael