This is never a good time of year for me.

As I sit down to write this column, I celebrate my 38th birthday today. My monitor heater doesn’t like the 10 and 20-below zero weather so it’s been randomly shutting off all week.

The hard crusty snow is piled on my deck and I have nightmares that my deck will collapse under the weight. The only winter sport my wife and I participate in is bill juggling. Time Warner can wait, we need more K1!

I’m almost 40 and in this youth and baby-boomer obsessed world I feel like a man without a country. I’m too poor to pay my bills on time but to “rich” to qualify for heating assistance. There’s nothing good on TV and my wife won’t let me drink booze anymore. Seems like a good time for my mind to wander to my happy place.

Most of us have a happy place in mind that we go to when things seem helpless. For me, my happy place is Ireland. My wife and I were lucky enough to spend our honeymoon in Ireland in September of 2004. Looking back now I probably should have gone into lifelong debt putting new windows in and re-siding my house, but Ireland was well worth it.

OK, so now I’m in my happy place. Pretend you and I are having a pint of creamy smooth Guinness in Kilarney and I’m telling you all of this. So I was thinking the other day that I am only a third generation American. My great-grandfather on my dad’s side came from Quebec and his family had taken a coffin ship out of Cork during the famine in 1848.

On my mother’s side, my great-granddad was born in Manchester, England and his mother was from Armagh in the north of Ireland. I actually knew my great-granddad who was born in 1883 in England. I was six years old when he died at the age of 92 back in 1975. I have a book of Irish songs that belonged to his mother that she brought from Ireland in the 1850s so I feel I have a great connection to the past and to Ireland.

With all of this family history and pride swirling around my head, it’s always a little weird standing in line at the bank and seeing all of that history of struggle reduced to a paper leprechaun with his pot of gold stuck to the teller’s window.

I think I know what it is. We are so desperate for anything green by this time that we latch on to St. Patrick’s Day. It’s no surprise either that the beer companies and marketing people latched on to our holiday to promote good cheer and hope for spring. If there were no St. Patrick’s day, we would have to invent one.

After all, we are for the most part, a gregarious and loving people who are willing to share our joy if it makes other people happy. I have family friends from County Galway that own an Irish restaurant in Biddeford. Every Patty’s Day they make their money working long hours serving corned beef and cabbage, Jameson and Guinness.

March 17th is a day they look forward to and dread at the same time. The brogues get a little thicker and the place is usually decked out in flashy promotional beer merchandise and paper leprechauns. If they need to do all of that to bring in customers and keep the tips flowing, they are more than willing to put up with the crowds and the long hours.

Sometimes people do real dumb things on Patty’s Day so I cringe when I hear people say that everybody is Irish on March 17. But if it makes you happy, you can be Irish on March 17 if you want to be. After all, St. Patrick himself was a kidnap victim who was probably not Irish.

So, back to my happy place. You and I are at the foot of Croagh Patrick, St. Patrick’s mountain in western Ireland. We are standing near the statue of St. Patrick overlooking the countryside and the coffin ship famine memorial across the street. It’s unbelievably sad and beautiful at the same time. Tears of joy mix with tears of sadness as they run down my face. I think about my ancestors and what they must have gone through to come to America so that their families and future generations could have a better life.

You know what? I’ve changed my mind. Everyone’s not Irish on St. Patrick’s day, that wouldn’t be right. And if you have a problem with that you can take your paper leprechaun and pot of gold and go to your happy place.

Chris Clark lives in Standish.