The St. Patrick's Day Ride in Dyersville

It’s bicycling weather! Well, not today, because temperatures won’t budge out of the low thirties, but we’ve been on four rides already. We went to RPM and cycle classes at Core Fitness all winter, twice a week, and then rode to Hills and back from southeast Iowa City on Friday, March 13th. The next day we drove up to Dyersville, Iowa, for the St. Patrick’s Day Ride in Irish/German country in northeastern Iowa. People were standing upright more than usual in the bars, so I enjoyed the ride more than usual. There’s nothing sadder than drunks falling into ditches and ambulances screaming out to get them on long country roads, sobering up all the bicyclists they pass.

I’ll never forget the time I went to Dyersville to drown my sorrows and ended up listening to someone else’s sorrows, which were considerable. I offered to buy him a beer, and he pulled a thick wad of cash out of his pocket and started buying me gin-and-tonics, one after the other. I never did get a chance to buy him a beer. I listened to his story, which was about a woman who’d dumped him, and that was bad enough. But he loved her five children, most by different fathers, and now he had no legal way to stay in touch with them, so he lost not only her but them.

He could knock a lot of beer back, but my limit is two, maybe three gin-and-tonics. Six or seven is way too many, so that was the one time that instead of being repulsed by other people’s drinking, I got put to bed myself.

The MelonHeads, including my husband, checked back with me at 4:00 p.m. at our motel to see if I was available for dinner, but I could barely walk to the bathroom, so I went back to bed to sleep it off some more. I’m not proud of that episode, but I was hurting badly from a terribly crushing experience, and no one wanted to be unconscious more than I did. Had I paid for those drinks myself, maybe I would have noticed how many I was putting away, but I didn’t.

This year and in other years since, I’ve stayed sober enough to enjoy the wonderful Irish feast that I missed that day at Jeanie’s house in Dyersville. Jeanie’s not even Irish, but boy, can she cook! When her husband was in law school at the University of Iowa, she worked for food service, and she said she cooked as a child, too. I’d never had corned beef with sour cream mixed with horseradish, but I definitely prefer it as a garnish to mustard, which is always how I’ve had corned beef before. And she didn’t use green cabbage. She used red, and put vinegar and other stuff in it to make it really taste good. The new potatoes, parsnips, turnips, and other vegetables were tasty too. She gave me the recipe for Irish soda bread and I’ve made it, but I’m going to try to get all of her recipes, because she and her cooking are the best!

Jeanie told me that her maternal grandmother arrived in Iowa on one of the Orphan Trains. The little orphan was two years old, and the only identifying characteristic on her was a tag around her neck that said, “Lyodia” or “Lyotia.” A family with 12 children adopted her, so she made 13. The Orphan Train, as you may have seen on public television, was a train that originated in New York City. There were thousands of homeless children roaming the streets of New York City scrounging for food, so the Children’s Aid Society sent the orphans to the Midwest so farmers and others could look them over and see if any seemed capable of helping on the farm or were of interest to them for other reasons. Not all were treated well. Lyodia, if that was her name, never mentioned her circumstances to her own daughter, Jeanie’s mother, but Jeanie learned her grandmother’s story from her grandmother’s neighbor. Evidently, the grandmother told the neighbor her story.

I told Jeanie that if she had her DNA done, her mitochondrial DNA would be the same as her grandmother’s, and she could learn what her ethnicity is and what Lyodia’s was. As it is, she doesn’t know. She only knows her father’s side. I hope Jeanie or one of her daughter’s follows up, but having your DNA done is not cheap. Around Christmas time, there’s usually a sale at National Geographic’s Genographic Project. Otherwise it’s about $200 for starters.