A Saint Patrick's Day Queen
Memory takes its own pictures
First published in Medium in 2023
No one will ever be able to see the green in the black-and-white photographs of the Montréal Saint Patrick’s Day Parade of 1959. Whatever the shade of green, it’s lost to history, along with most of the images from that day. Among them, the five beautiful Irish girls, identically dressed in green gowns, riding on a Shamrock-shaped float: the Parade Queen and Her Court. My mother was one of the girls on the float.
The Montréal parade still has a queen, but it is now a leadership/public speaking award. Back then it was a beauty contest. Mom told me there was the pre-parade selection night where guests voted for the Saint Patrick’s Queen with their applause. The girl with the most applause was selected, and four runners-up were the Court. I am not sure what inspired my mother to enter this contest. Maybe a boy had dared her? Maybe my grandmother, who was so proud of her pretty daughter, had asked her?
When I was growing up, if there was nothing to do, I sometimes looked at my mother’s scrapbooks, which included an album of pictures of the parade. I always carefully examined the photos of the parade float with the Queen and Her Court. In my kid’s opinion, the Saint Patrick’s Queen that year could not have been as pretty as my own mother. Whenever I said so, Mom insisted the Queen had that type of evanescent Irish beauty not readily captured in pictures. That was the message for me, growing up. Many years later, she told me that the Queen also had an especially large and rowdy family who generated deafening applause on selection night.
The parade included Irish clubs, teams, marching bands, parish churches, and representatives from Irish communities in Québec’s disappearing English-speaking rural towns. Some carried the green, white, and orange flags of the Republic of Ireland, and some the Québec fleur de lis. And, at the very end of the parade, its pièce de résistance, the Shamrock-shaped float bedecked with crêpe paper, carrying the Queen and Her Court. They wore their little fur-trimmed capes high on their shoulders, almost at their ears: it was March in Canada, after all.
The parade passed a reviewing stand at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel. Montréal Mayor Sarto Fournier had his picture taken with the Queen and Her Court. He shook hands with each girl. When he got to Mom, he whispered in her ear: You are the most beautiful one. She later wondered if he had said that to each of them.
Toward the end of her life, Mom thought of returning to Montréal and walking in the parade again, as one of the Court alumnae. Then she thought: what’s the point? She had asked that question of most of her possessions, too, by then. You can’t take any of it with you.
We emptied her apartment after she died. I went looking for her scrapbooks and photo albums. I was devastated to discover that she’d thrown out all her photos and news clippings of that day. She’d probably decided they wouldn’t be of interest to anyone after she was gone. They were barely of any interest to her then. What was the point of hanging onto a few black and white photos of herself from sixty years ago, sitting on a parade float with a bunch of people she didn’t know?
Looking at her albums as a kid, I’d sometimes ask her about the parade, but it never came up in the decades that followed. One day in her later years we somehow got to talking about the parade, and she shared a detail I’d never heard before.
My grandmother was a French Québécoise who had married an Irishman and raised her family in an Irish neighborhood. Mom told me that my grandmother had gone to the parade by herself that day, and waited all morning in the cold to see her daughter go by on a float. In fact, my grandmother followed the entire parade route, staying ahead of the float, swimming against the human tide of onlookers, repeatedly stopping to turn around and wave.
As the float made its way down Sherbrooke Street, every time Mom looked into the throng of parade watchers, everywhere she looked, there was her mother, bobbing up in the crowd, beaming and waving.
That’s a memory more precious than any photo or news clipping. A memory to take into eternity.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
Thank you for sharing such a personal and touching memory of your mother and grandmother; it serves as a beautiful reminder of what truly endures beyond the parade of life.
This is beautiful! Love the twist...she was Quebecoise.