Without Irish-born Jim Lucey, whose shop on Gothic Street in Northampton, Massachusetts, frequently enjoyed the visit of young Calvin Coolidge, it is fair to say a very different, even quietly anonymous, life awaited the Amherst student. Without Lucey, craftsman, philosopher, and friend, Cal’s life would have been all the more meager. Most of us can identify such a force in our own life’s pathway but not all of them expressed their wisdom in poetry. Lucey, gifted with his island’s aoibh [eev], once wrote:

Look any old way you will;

Life is merely the thing we make it.

This is the truth about good or ill;

It all depends on how we take it.

…

Life is not a month or year;

Worth not merely one triumph splendid.

Many and strange are the pitfalls here

‘Til fame and the struggle for it are ended.

Luck can fatten the purse in a day,

But luck won’t teach us a thing worth learning

Wisdom is something day by day

We have to gain for ourselves by earning.

To read more, pick up a copy of Salient Cal’s America: Reappraising the Harding & Coolidge Era.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh!