So I'm walking in this cemetery near my house around 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, giddy with the promise of an unexpected day off on Friday, stepping in time to the tunes on my Walkman CD, with a street-legal blood alcohol level of about .066 and having a groovy old time. Suddenly, I step on a potato and almost break my ankle. Seriously. A potato. In the cemetery. Left in front of somebody's headstone. As a memento of what, their terrific potato-leek soup?!

Perhaps the potato was left there by a concerned nature lover as food for the couple of deer that reside in this cemetery. It's a small, lovely island of natural beauty and historical oddities, smack in the middle of a depressed and depressing urban area. Picking up the potato, I have a minor epiphany, kind of like the scene in some movie I saw recently — I think it was "Mad Dog and Glory" — where the guy sees a deer in the middle of the road at 3 a.m. in the middle of downtown Chicago, (or L.A.? or N.Y.C. ?, it doesn't matter, anyway, as long as we're agreed it's not DesMoines or Berlin or Calcutta). So this guy sees the deer, and the absolute absurdity of nature breaking into man's concrete fortress really moves him.

My epiphany's not quite so glamorous, but with the right kind of dramatic Hollywood lighting and musical score, perhaps it could be. Holding this potato, I find myself thinking of the headstone it was lying on top of, and the person interred there. Somebody named John Connolly, born 1846, died 1928. If he died that long ago, yet he still has folks visiting his grave, what does that say about his life? What does that say about his family? Even if the potato wasn't put there on on purpose, what does its presence here in this cemetery have to say about my life?

As I reflect on this potato, I think about the historic Irish Potato Famine, and I smile. Not that I make a habit of smiling at the misfortune of millions of honest, hard-working Irish. After all, I am one myself. Well, ... I'm honest, at least. But I smile because I suddenly catch a glimpse of my own family history, a perspective that I've never had before. All around me, in this green and gray conservatory for the mystery of our history, there are other tombstones of Irish immigrants who lived and died before my parents or even my grandparents were born. And dead friends all around me are my refugee cousins, my hopeful uncles, my brothers-in-arms in the fight against all the world's dark forces — both political and spiritual— that keep people starving and fighting and hating even now.

There are other nationalities in this cemetery as well, but a look around at all the Irish names here makes it clear they're the majority. It occurs to me — thanks to the bit of Irish history I've picked up from movies, documentaries and my graduate work— that the situations that caused these distant cousins of mine to come over from the island were actually blessings in disguise. These are the unhappy Irish, who voted with their feet when no other alternatives were given them on "the old sod". But if they didn't find happiness on American soil, at least they found hope, and perhaps planted the seed for my own happiness.

For instance, these headstones here with John and Doreen Connolly's names on them. Two smallish matching granite stones, side by side, each with a cross carved in it along with the occupant's not-so-vital statistics. I begin to make up their story in my head, the story of how their great granddaughter came to put a potato on their grave just days before my late-night cemetary stroll. Born in Dublin in 1846 (or so it says here on the stone), in the midst of the potato blight, little John was soon brought to America by his family. They were among the first of the one million poor Irish who emigrated between 1845 and 1850 to escape starvation and typhoid. While in his twenties, he met a lovely young Irish-American women named Doreen, and quickly made her his bride. Maybe they moved to Chicago in 1879 with their two kids. Their second child, we'll say a daughter named Sheila, became a teacher in the Chicago public schools before getting married and having children of her own. And in one of Sheila's classes was a shy, studious little girl named Maureen O'Brien, whom she encouraged and taught about great writers and historical figures, thus beginning Maureen's lifelong love of reading. Maureen, a grandchild of Famine-era immigrants herself, eventually grew up and married Henry Nielsen, my grandfather, and soon afterward passed that love of reading on to my father, who passed it on to me, the guy who tripped on the potato.

These wondrous inheritances were not especially planned or intentional, just a happy accident of genetics and culture. But however it happened, even if it wasn't quite as easy and happy as I've made it seem here, I reap the blessing of the Potato Famine every time I pick up a novel or teach a kid something I've learned. Another blessing: I'm not actively persecuted or starving, two oft-forgotten blessings for an "average white boy" in late twentieth century middle-class America. Unless you call slow-moving lines at the grocery store a form of either persecution or starvation.

So in this epiphany I realize that for all my American flag-trampling, and despite my claim to be an unbiased "citizen of the world" and not just America the Strange, ultimately I'm glad and proud to be the offspring of immigrants, and a citizen of a free and strong nation. Not that we should rest on our laurels and refuse to share the wealth or admit our faults. I'm no "love-it-or-leave-it" brand of shallow American. After all, dissent is what our democratic values are based on ... the agreement that if we don't like what the government's up to, we'll just wait patiently for four to six years and then throw the whole lot of them out on their asses. However, we usually opt for smaller, more gradual changes, for we know that with nations, as with people, nobody's perfect. But this nation — whether we have adopted it, or it has adopted us — is a pretty good home, as fixer-uppers go. Lots of space, nice neighbors, relatively good schools ... you know the drill. With its complicated mixture of special interest groups, of ethnic neighborhoods and local bars, of rich and poor, of nipple-pierced Gen-Xer's and their confused parents trying to keep up with the times, of Native Americans and American natives, of Irish and Chinese and Poles and Jews and Polish Jews and probably even a few Chinese Jews, this nation belongs to me — from California to the New York garbage scows, just like the song says. And why? Because somewhere, long ago, for better or for worse, a bunch of immigrants claimed squatters' rights and would not budge.

So I'm holding this potato, and suddenly I feel like a legitimate part of some Irish-American tribe. It's like the potato is my credential, my pass key, a concrete object to connect me to these people of the past and carry their stories and concerns into the future. By comparison, there are things that I've always noticed and even envied in the Jewish culture — that distinct tribal identity, the long history of persecution and perseverence, that sense of humor and pathos, and that vague economic or social insecurity that leads a Jew to depend upon familial and spiritual homes rather than wooden or brick ones. But it suddenly occurs to me that the Jews and the Irish have much in common when it comes to enduring religious persecution — or even just being the world's doormat, the ones undeservedly "caught in the middle" of the world's squabbles.

So, as symbols go, the Jews have their Star of David, and the Irish have their humble potato. I start for home, taking my potato of blessing with me. I will put it somewhere special. I won't trade it for anything. I might even shellac it so it'll last. Maybe I'll have them bury it with me when I die. In fact, here's a good spot, just down the cemetery path a bit from John and Doreen Connolly. And in the words of that old Irish blessing: may I be in heaven half an hour before the Devil knows I'm dead.