Only for five or ten minutes that is, when I was caught up in Toronto's St. Patrick's Day Parade, with its phalanxes of drum and fife bands, horses, Asians - cultic such as Falun Dafa and non-cultic such as the Pinoy Boy Band - passing for Irish, Ms. Canada International, all lovely and lonely at the back of a Mercedes convertible, clowns and mascots*, bad Irish folk singing, hung-over people etc etc on Bloor.

All these festivities, of course, delayed my getting to the local office of my firm where I spent a happy Sunday afternoon and evening earning my over-priced daily bread. Since I wasn't drunk (or had the time to get drunk later in the evening) I let the pair of green gloves I was wearing, a cover-song by The Corrs (if I was a rich man, la de da, I would totally go for the raven-haired lead singer, Andrea Corr) I played in the afternoon, and finally, those lovely lovely sonnets Seamus Heaney wrote for, and about his mother, in the sequence "Clearances" I re-read (I also had the fortune of seeing the great man recite these sonnets in his inimitable Irish brogue few years ago) before bed last night, stand for things that enable me to say this morning, I was Irish too.

When Abida sings to you the questions posed by Bulleh Shah, you go mute:

"Read, read a thousand books, but do you ever read what is written inside yourself?

Go, go to the temple and the mosque but do you ever pay a visit to the soul inside yourself?"