A Stitch in Haste

In this post, I shared with you one of my two favorite Irish drinking songs (yes, I have favorite Irish drinking songs, and I’m not even Irish), “Staten Island,” and suggested that maybe, someday, I would post the lyrics to my other favorite, “The Streets of New York” (also called “Uncle Benji”).

Well, today is not that day.

But I will share two verses with you:

I sold up for the old farmyard
For what it was worth,
And into my bag
Stuck a handful of earth.

Then I boarded a train,
And I caught me a plane,
And I found myself back
In the U.S. again.

Well, I think I have discovered a new underlying meaning to those lyrics:

Two Irishmen have set up a business selling dirt to nostalgic Irish Americans who want a handful of “the mother country” on their graves.

Pat Burke, 27, and Alan Jenkins, 65, have just shipped their first $1 million load of “official” Irish soil to New York — at $15 per 340 gram bag — and confidently expect it will be followed by many more.

“The demand has been absolutely phenomenal,” Burke, an agricultural scientist from County Tipperary, said on Friday.

So it seems that, when our storyteller says he “stuck a handful of earth” into his bag, it was for his eventual funeral, since he knew that he would never be returning to Ireland. Suddenly that verse has a far more powerful meaning. Go figure.

(Via Market Power.)

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Filed under: Capitalism, Personal Topics