Every summer, a teeming horde of young Irish men and women descend on San Francisco for a taste of life in the big American city. Youthful, exuberant, and almost sweet enough to convince one that there really is such a thing as innocence in the twenty-first century, they come to San Francisco for what seems like just three months’ worth of America for perhaps a whole lifetime. Frankly, that’s probably more than enough.

I don’t know if there’s an actual overt summer program based at some Eire university or a collection of them, but it seems more of an organic tradition than anything overt. They come seeking summer jobs and summer sublets, immersing themselves in a culture that must seem supercharged and hyper compared to the green homeland hills. Do they come to every city? Does San Francisco share a special place in the heart of the young Irish fancy? Until I move, I may never know.

My special insight into this small temporal demographic of the City comes from two sources. For one, the Irish, like all Europeans, are more accustomed to riding trains than the average American. So they fill the subways when the rest of us might otherwise leave them empty. But I might never have truly noticed the trend had Emily not worked so long and devastatingly hard for PIRG, finding many of the young Irish in the employ of their summer canvass by summer’s end. They come, no doubt seeking just enough work to earn their room and board and revelry in the midst of one California season. They left, those at PIRG, thinking that only in America can we muck up idealism and civic engagement with obsequious panhandling and worker abuse. No doubt, it’s a lesson worth learning from our sordid country.

I was nestled amongst three such Irish on the train home today: two lasses and a lad full of the high optimism of early summer interviews. They were tired and already feeling the pinch of the interview process, but one among them had been triumphantly offered a job at a clothes shop that afternoon, recounting an amusing anecdote of picking up a shirt to demonstrate her sales technique and finding it rather small. “Can you believe,” she went on to explain, “they have a clothes shop only for children?”

“I would love to work in a clothes shop,” her fellow female responded wistfully.

I’m likely painting a far more starry-eyed visage of these young Eireanns than they deserve, but if so, it’s because I want to believe. My picture of Ireland is idealized enough as it is without idealistic fresh-faced inhabitants coming to San Francisco with their folkloric accents and ginger freckles. No doubt I would’ve jumped at the chance one summer to take off for three months in Dublin with a handful of friends. And maybe I would’ve never returned.

It might also be worth noting that Irish is my selective heritage. I say selective because truly “European mutt” is the only description that can fit my bill, though Irish is tied with English and German at the top of the list. Somehow Ireland’s history feels better to me than England’s or Germany’s, though, and I’ve taken a special liking to that particular quarter. I say it here perhaps only to disclaim my interest in these visitors, or perhaps disclaim anything that might be misinterpreted. These are “my people” and I can say what I want to, like so many religious and ethnic groups will speak of their own.

Of course, truly, I have no people except those friends I select and the parents who raised me. Any ethnic kinship with any real group feels shameful at worst, irrelevant at best. And America? What is America except a place to disappoint the hopeful aspirations of a downtrodden but rising race of Irish?

And yet they keep coming. If you have to come, it might as well be San Francisco. Weather just like home, only less interesting. The isolation of a peninsula to replace an island. A sense of quiet perseverance against a surrounding world that might not understand.

Malarkey? Blarney?

You mc the call.