SNIPPET: Margo LOCKWOOD is the author of several volumes of poetry, including "Left-Handed Happiness," "Bare Elegy," and "Black Dog." She was living in Brookline, MA, 1997, at the time she reflected on the subject of lace curtains: She admitted to feeling sometimes bothered by the term 'lace-curtain Irish.' Per Margo -- "Some Irish-Americans use it in a self-mocking way, not about themselves, but about their grandparents, perhaps, or some distant relative. I used to hear it employed to describe a section of town more wealthy and established, where people owned rather than rented their houses. It may not have been an epithet for people who wanted to better themselves or who were aping their betters. They wanted to have lace curtains up, too, but maybe all their furniture was just right out of the alley. There was a pejorative sense that people were putting up a front...." Looking back, Margo recalled - "When I was eight years old, in 1947, we lived on the second floor of a rented three-decker in a neighborhood of Brookline, MA, called Whiskey Point. My mother brought a proper frame for the starching and stretch-drying of our lace curtains from the household of a neighbor who had died. It was a long, expandable oak frame propped up on pointed legs, and there were two-inch needles that held up to six lace curtains at a time, one atop the other, so they could dry from morning till night. Kneeling on the porch floor and taking the curtains out one by one from the starch water, out from the zinc tub, I would be allowed to place the curtains on the needles. I always slipped and pricked my fingers, and there would be blood on the borders of those curtains. The lace was stiff from the starch, even when wet. You had to be quick and nimble-fingered. The material would drip on you as you positioned your outstreched arms to flip the curtain up to the top of the frame. Even if one lace curtain didn't have the little bit of red bloodstain on it, another would. To me, the lace curtain was our beauty because I never liked our furniture. It meant we would suffer to have a nice house. . The lace curtains defined us. We had to have something up at the windows over dark green canvas blackout blinds, dusty and ripped and taped, which were obigatory all during the Second World War. By the time the 40's and then the 50's were over, a political wind shifted. And there was a lot more than lace curtains blowing in the wind. The ascension of John F. KENNEDY to the White House made the press very interested in analyzing his family style. They were fascinated with the way Rose KENNEDY was supposed to be an arbiter in the ways of Irish social life. So in the papers you would read those kinds of 'tag phrases' about the Irish being used offhandedly and, in the main, not to any point. Later, in 1972, when I went to live in Dublin with my three children, I saw early models for Boston lace curtains hanging from tall windows in nearly derelict houses propped up with massive beams. The fan lights and casement windows were broken in part, and the house for generations had been reverting to tenements with many families inhabiting them. My mother came to visit and walked with me over the quays and the O'Connell Street Bridge to see the city. We had our barmbrack and tea, sitting on Bewley's velvet couches in the famous Oriental Tea Rooms, and then crossed over to the rough Northside of Dublin. The houses were still magnificent there, 18th century Georgian places, but the days when they housed high-toned Anglo-Irish 'rentiers' or English civil servants were long past. I had to visit the houses on on Capel Street and Pearse Square to order school uniforms and pay a fee to 'clothiers' or 'outfitters' who had concessions from the Christian Brothers' school where I had just enrolled my children. Many a dim gray morning I had to track through the Northside streets to find some spinster who would measure up a child for a uniform. I hated those errands, but I loved to peer into the old house fronts and see those lace curtains. They served as fashionable filters for aristocratic Liffey-side Dubliners. But in the early 70's they were frayed remnants, the scrim of the lives of the impoverished residents but they were nonetheless beautiful. My mother was bemused by the elaborate lace designs and wondered aloud how old they were. She said it was like impressive Spanish lace she'd studied in the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston, from the 17th and 18th centuries. Lacework was honored in Ireland, and because of the flax and linen trades, it was once a cottage industry. And it made its way to the three-deckers in Irish-American neighborhoods. And who is to complain if what the lace curtains once represented is no longer there, if the lace curtains still blow in the windows on Dublin's Northside or on the Jamaica Road back porches of my memory?" -- Excerpts, "The Irish In America," eds. Coffey and Golway (1997)