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An Irish Catholic Memoir - Page 2

© Audrey McCrone

People all around Frankie, while in Ireland, die because of the River Shannon, which floods its banks right into their homes, keeping everything damp and ripe for disease to spread (so much so that they must migrate to the loft-'Italy'-where it's at least tolerably dry). Besides siblings, Frankie loses friends: Mickey Spellacy (whose sibling were dropping like flies), Quasimodo Dooley (the BBC wannabe), and Theresa Carmody (his first love) of consumption; Patricia Madigan (the Catholic hospital patient, who loved poetry) of diptheria. Everyone else if just sick all the time, Frankie himself having bouts with typhoid fever and chronic conjunctivitis. He turns to the adult advice given him, in that, "When you grown up you'll laugh," even if it came from his Uncle Pat, who everyone knows has been dropped on his head as a lad. I guess we all had an uncle like that. Humor is a method of coping that adds well to the humanity of McCourt's story.

Another method of coping, which many become disillusioned with through the process of learning, is religion. The Roman Catholic Church is full of moral-based interpretations infused into the one piece of literature they base things on: The Bible. In Angela's Ashes Catholic education is reiterated: we see the Sacred Heart as well as other symbols. Communion is symbolically the body and blood of Christ, who has died so that we may be redeemed of sin. Frankie's Grandma take religion too literally, getting offended that he should get so sick as to throw up in her yard the wafer he swallowed at his first Communion. As Frankie grows, he has the door shut in his face twice by priests, but also finds comfort in the few of them that are actually sincere. One priest tells him, after Frankie confesses to having stolen a lunch because he was hungry, that HE should be washing Frankie's feet, and to please say a prayer for him. That story, taken right from the days of Jesus roaming the Earth, was touching, as was the episode where Frankie breaks down at the statue of St. Francis of Assisi, his patron saint.

Poor. Franie's family was so poor it amazed me that his father wouldn't hold a job for longer than three weeks at a time. Frankie learned to be valiant, being the Robin Hood his family needed just to get by, turning to his Angel of the Seventh Step for the answers he couldn't find on his own, as a child. Growing up, we learn the fairy tale behind the stories our parents tell us to protect us from the truth. The truth is that sometimes we have bad role models for parents, teaching us with everything they do. Hopefully, we learn from it, rather than repeat the past.

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