By: Colleen Duncan
I’m in the middle of a six hour shift at Shoprite when a customer enters my checkout line. He greets me with a slight smirk and a “Hello, Girl,” despite the prominent placement of my nametag. You might think the customer was being rude, purposely disregarding my actual name, but actually, he was just trying to be clever. I know this because, believe it or not, it’s definitely not the first time I’ve gotten it.
My name is Colleen, which apparently, as I’ve learned from many random strangers, means “Girl” in Gaelic. The irony of it: I’m not actually Irish.
At first, I was confused when someone would exclaim that, they too, were Irish.
I used to correct them, telling their disappointed and slightly embarrassed faces that nothing about me, besides my name, is Irish. I’m Italian, Portuguese, English, and slightly Scottish, but not one drop of my blood hails from the rolling green hills of Ireland. Sorry.
The more assertions I get about my heritage, however, the less fight I have. Although it can get old when complete strangers demand they know more about my lineage than I do, I frankly haven’t the heart to interrupt an impromptu Gaelic hymn or a feigned Irish accent to break the unfortunate truth. Trust me, if you saw how hard they try, you wouldn’t be able to either.
So now, as the prices drop on bags of potatoes, cabbage suddenly sounds appetizing, and packages of corned beef fly off the shelves, I don my greenest shirts and channel my inner Girl. Because, after all, near the seventeenth of March, everyone pretends to be a little Irish, don’t they?