Mickey’s Green

We are familiar with St. Patrick, the Roman-Brit boy captured by Irish pirates, found his way back to England six years later, only to return to Ireland as a missionary. (I was raised a Protestant so you will forgive my irreverent disregard for saintly details.)

St. Patrick is not really our focus, though a big parade always takes place on St. Patrick’s Day in NYC and leaves the Irish proud. It is the Mickey malt liquor on a green bottle with an ABV percent content of 5.6 that we hold on our left hand. Mickey is often referred to as a grenade, with its beehive-shaped, wide-mouthed waffle designed bottles of 16 to 40 ounces.

One can’t get more Mickey than when the Irish play football (soccer, in America).  The Irish team headed by popular player Keane and former player-coach McCarthy prepared for the FIFA in Saipan in 2002 for Japan. What has been called the Saipan Incidence in the football world emerged from two differing perspectives. Keane was keen on winning the FIFA championship and came to Saipan to prepare for it; he accused McCarthy as derelict to his coaching duties.

He thought the Irish Federation, with officials sitting on First Class in the plane while the players sat on Second Class on the long haul from Ireland, noticed the condition of the playing field where they were to practice. It became clear to him that the team and its officials were more on a junket than on the isle to prepare. Keane left the team.

One son-in-law is Irish, straight from Galway, who resides in the United States, a tunnel worker currently underground in San Francisco boring on a city subway project while two boys bask on the sun on the Oakland foothills. I met him at an Arlington, VA pub when I lived in the area and he did tunneling in the DC area; he could nurse his brew and quaff his beer like water, in the same way the French imbibe on their wine. He and my daughter raise two boys. They play soccer!

(My eldest has two boys, too, and with grandpa, could easily dribble to the backcourt as a basketball team, but they also play soccer!)

Mickey marketed as a malt liquor (strong beer) is slightly higher in ABV percentage than the local Bud but the American Mickey gives the impression of being Irish. It is all in the perspective, which tends to determine expectation and how fast one “gets drunk”, faster with Mickey rather than the other variety.  It is more expensive than just the regular can or bottle. I bought half a dozen of the 40 oz. just so I can use the bottle as water container in the refrigerator.

St. Patrick the Brit is the most popular saint in Ireland, patron saint of a Celtic-based nation as opposed to the English. In a similar fashion, it is the “green” of the Planet Earth that has become a global color, never mind that the land and skies have turned murky brown. As we wrote earlier, the greening of the planet is not so we can maintain the freshness of our planetary dwelling (too late) as we have turned it into the carbon monoxide-laden skies of our familiar, but so we can mitigate its further spread. The effort looks better on public relations than in the actual reduction of carbon emission, but like the Mickey perspective, the greening of the planet serves as a useful perspective more than furthering its reversal.

St. Patrick became “Irish” by adoption, as Mickey has become my beer by decision.  The greening of the planet is a social practice that we can all choose as an option.

A recent picture of what we are expected to be known 100 years from now is a plastic bottle on the sand. Our future was characterized by a well-meaning executive to a newly graduate character played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 movie, the Graduate, as “plastic.” He was on target.

That’s one area where we can begin. Plastic has a life expectancy of 10,000 years, and it only disintegrates into small pieces. We can all participate in the management of our common kitchen variety plastic.

A man in my neighborhood picks up plastic trash in our parking lot. He does not make a big fuzz of it, nor does he get into a crusade; he just picks up the trash. I walk Saipan’s pathway with a plastic bag to gather carelessly strewn wrappers and food containers blown into the shore. At high tide, they are swept into the lagoon to the detriment of the algae and fish. Thrown milk containers are a bane to the ground everywhere.

Reusing plastic containers is another activity where each can participate. The bottle of Mickey for water in my fridge is obviously insignificant, but if we bother to scissor-strip the soft and malleable plastics that populate our kitchens before putting them in the trash and finding their way into the dumpster, it compacts the ingredient before it is piled up in the dump.  OK. It is a Band-Aid operation but it is something we can do. Of course, concerted efforts by government bodies and private entities to recycle more is needed, but the greening of Earth is everyone’s responsibility!

I suspect St. Patrick might agree.