1
HARRISON
I fucking hate March.
The worst month of the year by far.
But Harrison, you might say, it’s the first month of spring. The month of the first blossoms of the trees. The snow is beginning to melt, the sun beginning to peek through the skies of gray.
Big fucking deal.
The city of Chicago goes all out for March. Every damned window is covered with four-leaf clovers, pots of gold, and mischievous leprechauns. Then of course there’s the drinking. My hospital, St. Charles General, is always swamped with patients suffering from alcohol poisoning or brawl-related injuries this time of year.
The city’s gravest sin, though, is the millions of gallons of green dye that it pours into the Chicago River to mark the occasion. Makes the whole thing look like a runoff of toxic sewage. I have to cross it on my commute from my home in Oak Park every time I come into the city, holding my breath against any noxious fumes.
Of course, these are merely symptoms of my disdain for the month.
The real reason—well, one of the reasons—is because my birthday is the seventeenth.
Yep. You heard that right.
St. Patrick’s Day.
My parents were thrilled. The firstborn son of two second-generation Irish-Americans, born on the day when the Yanks celebrate our culture by drinking more whiskey and Guinness than their livers could ever hope to process. They dressed me up in leprechaun onesies the first several years of my life and then always made sure my wardrobe had plenty of green in it.
I never wear green anymore. It’s my favorite color, but I consciously stopped wearing it in middle school.
Fuck… Middle school.
Those years are rough on anyone, but for me…
Damn.
I don’t like to think about it.
Because not only was I born on the Irish people’s answer to Christmas, not only did my parents dress me in an all-green wardrobe until I started sprouting armpit hair…
But as luck would have it, I was born with abnormally large ears.
And the school bullies had their way with me about them for years.
Any name you can think of, they called me. A lot of rabbit-inspired options, of course. And once they realized that the first syllable of my name was a synonym for our cotton-tailed friends, they were unstoppable.
I grew into my ears eventually.
But the scars of those formative years will never heal.
The bullying was just the beginning of it.
But I shake the thought from my head.
Look at me now, Mom! I’m an attending physician at one of Chicago’s leading hospitals. I make a shit ton of money, bought my first home—an actual house, with a yard and everything—in a good part of Oak Park, and I have a prime reserved parking spot right in the Loop. St. Charles treats its doctors well.
The nurses don’t get parking, but whatever. Most of them live right off the L, so their commutes are pretty straightforward anyway. And if they’re not driving, they’re doing their part to save the whales or the pandas or whatever cause we’re all tacitly agreeing to support this week.
I, on the other hand, am driving my car, a vintage 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, into work today. I’m the envy of all my colleagues except for my best friend, Maddox Hathaway, whose gorgeous 1967 Rolls-Royce makes my vehicle look like a bumper car. Of course, Maddox got his car from his father, and I worked tooth and nail to be able to buy my little beauty and get her fixed up like new. And yes, I’m already holding my breath as I pass over the river, even though the city isn’t scheduled to dye it until tomorrow. It’s probably good sense no matter what time of year it is. God knows what—or even who—might be interred in that waterway.
Jesus, where did that thought come from?
