Angela's Ashes, 'Tis, What an Illustrious Man....Frank McCourt? Gone!

What awesome memories and comeradery poverty brings! God bless the memory of a man like McCourt, who could make us laugh so hard at the sadness and silliness of childrearing in the darkest times of history. Not enough to go around; raisins in the muffins like diamonds: scarce, fought over. What a man, to remember with fondness the fighting and grumbling and growing pains. The pains of his birth and his mother’s birth, all having a purpose in the divine scheme of the providence of God. God created us all: the wanted, as well as the ignored. The children of the rich and the children of the poor. God gives us all things richly to enjoy and he helped us to enjoy the joys of poverty, if there can be said to be and enjoyment of it. I wanted to hear him read that passage, just one more time. It is not the same when I read it. They tore down the walls to heat the house and negotiated with the landlord that they had fewer rooms. We rolled at the thought of such a thing. This was truly an exaggeration. It makes us who have endured some want in life know that we will grow past those days. We can appreciate the difficult along with the prosperity. The land where we are, has many provisions for poverty and the impoverished and there are people who struggle and scrimp and save, but nothing like the potato famine. Nothing like the days of the French Revolution, nothing like the Holocaust. Nothing like the poverty of the third world, these stories of dire and unmerciful elements are close to obsolete in America and we can laugh at the storms. Tell me this isn’t Eden?

God was showing man that it is not worth it to sell God down the river. You will never find the satisfaction anywhere else in the world. Still, God is God and he did give the woman to the man. How can we have a relationship with God and one another. Poverty and simplicity of heartaches all over the world were the consequence of sin. Now clean it up. Now birth life, already. Everytime we birth life, we also birth death with it. Choose life.

Laughing about the sadness is definitely one of the healing balms. McCourt was the spoonholder for the serum that could make us laugh about the most unusual things. Sad and sordid, but funny and real and all too often, true. I will miss hearing him read his own thoughts with the intonations that only he could give.