Farewell, Frank

Yesterday while I was driving home from the movies with a friend, she told me that Frank McCourt had died.

Instantly, my mind raced back to the picture of the little boy on the cover of the book he published, Angela’s Ashes.

Frank McCourt was known for his wit and his prose. And he should be. After all, he taught creative writing in Stuyvesant High School for nearly 30 years. McCourt was not an immigrant. He was born in the boroughs of NYC but moved with his family to Ireland — the native land of his parents — during the Great Depression.

I clicked with his writing mainly for two reasons: his words glued my eyes to the page, and he grew up in squalor in the area of Limerick, Ireland — the birthplace of my maternal grandfather and half of my genes come from the green land.

After Frank’s book was published, his older brother Malachy wrote his own memoirs. His first, A Monk Swimming, was a play on words that I did not get until I read the book. The title itself is the mispronunciation of Malachy’s efforts to say “among women” from the Catholic prayer, Hail Mary.

One of my favorite quotes from Ashes is this:

I’m on deck the dawn we sail into New York. I’m sure I’m in a film, that it will end and lights will come up in the Lyric Cinema. . . . Rich Americans in top hats white ties and tails must be going home to bed with the gorgeous women with white teeth. The rest are going to work in warm comfortable offices and no one has a care in the world.

While there’s no “fancy” words here, this resonates with the common man and how they perceived the world and the obvious rift between the rich and poor during the years post-Great Depression.

Frank won the Pulitzer Prize for Angela’s Ashes, and his subsequent sequels, ‘Tis and Teacher Man carry on the literary prowess that Frank started with Ashes.

Yesterday, the literary world lost a nice old bloke.

Goodbye, Frank. Have a pint on me.