By Jim Hagarty
2006
March is a big month for special days. Next Friday, for example, is St. Patrick’s Day. Perversely, as someone who’s pretty much addicted to all things Irish and fascinated by the story of St. Patrick, I have no great affection for this day, at least not as I find myself rounding third base and beginning to head for home. Forty years ago, now that was a different matter. But as it stands in 2006, the day is all gimmicked up with little green leprechauns and green beer and everyone using a silly Irish accent. The national colour of Ireland isn’t even green, for Pat’s sake, or Pete’s sake, or whomever. (It’s blue).
Wednesday was International Women’s Day, a more recently created special day than the one dedicated to the fifth-century saint of Erin. No green beer drunk on this day and, in fact, I don’t think any sort of mind-altering substances are encouraged to mark the occasion. Though International Women’s Day was adopted by the UN only in 1977, the idea for it began at the beginning of the 20th century when women’s struggles focused on universal suffrage, reads a press release send to the newspaper where I work this week.
“The efforts and courage of women seeking social, economic, and political equality demanded, and finally achieved, symbolic recognition.”
I applaud the day and recognize the absolutely dreadful mistreatment of women that still persists in so many parts of the world today, including my own country Canada, but being of the gender that causes so much of that pain, I find it hard to celebrate. This day is for women, not for men.
That leaves National Potato Chip Day which was Tuesday, and not to diminish the importance of the two other days, if there ever was a food that was deserving of a national day of its own, it is the potato chip. Much-maligned in health-promoter circles these days, the potato chip, nevertheless does lot for the soul if not for the heart of a human. That delectable crunch of that first chip out of a newly opened bag, the salt that covers every lovely square inch of each thin, wavy wafer, the cold pop required to wash down all those delicious bits.
My love affair with potato chips goes back a long, long way. If memory serves, my best friend and I once bought small bags of them for five cents, then eventually 10 cents. We used to walk the mile and a half to the gas station in the village, him in one ditch, me in the other, searching for returnable bottles to exchange for our treats. For each bottle we cashed in, we received two cents. In those days, it seems, everyone tossed everything out of their car windows, so there were lots of goodies to be found, if you made it to the ditches before other eager fortune hunters arrived. Seven cents for a small bottle of pop, five cents for a bag of chips and my friend and I were livin’ large.
Then along came NHL hockey coins inside bags of potato chips and our joy was complete. To this day, when I open a bag of chips, I half expect to see a miniature round photo of Gordie Howe’s face smiling out at me from a plastic red coin, red for the Red Wings, of course.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and exclaim, not knowing this to be true for sure, that the reason my family left Ireland during the catastrophic potato failures in the late 1840s was the need we had to get to some country that still had potatoes – and potato chips. Because addiction to our chips is as much a Hagarty characteristic as freckles.
Ironically, if you ask for potato chips in a shop in Ireland, they hand you a mess of great big french fries on a sheet of blank newsprint. What we call potato chips, on the other hand, they call potato “crisps.” Potato crisps. Potato crisps. Nah, it just doesn’t have it. Which is why I could never live in Ireland.
Besides, you could never find a bag of crisps there with Gordie Howe inside. St. Patrick, maybe. On the other hand, didn’t St. Patrick (Patrick Roy) once play goal for the Montreal Canadiens?
