Frank McCourt has died.  He was too young and too diffident about life to tell us more about his.  His output, as a writer, was too little but we know more about the world although not enough about this open, yet reticent, man of letters.

As a teacher he inspired many and told the one great secret of what real writing consisted.  He told his students (who were in his New York High School English Classes) to write about what they know.  This was very, very good advice.  It must be noted that most writing is fictional and based on what sells.

I have looked through my pages and pages of THINKING ALLOWED that go back for more than thirty years and find that when I "blue sky" and talk about my most favorite subject, utopia, that I have to do it in the sense that I respect the devices of utopian makers and writers but get twisted up in relating it to how I live and have lived over 82 years.  I get to thinking about how mundane it would be if I were to relate the interpersonal relationships of a family that consisted of a mother in her almost too late child-bearing years, a father who had already had a wife taken from him by the Immigrant's disease, tuberculosis, and a sister who was seven years older and all of these mostly strangers to me, the only son.

But, what Frank McCourt gave to us was a painful picture of his upbringing in the Catholic Irish patrimony of poverty which produced many geniuses who were not shut down or shut up by deprivation.  His writing and his teaching inspired several generations of the lucky who had him as a teacher or who knew him through his writings. I can imagine him as a twisted gnome of a man who could laugh when crying and make others see the humor of the human condition.  One does not choose one's parents or relatives.  We come into this world and some accept it for what it is while others wish for something it is not and work to make it better.

Our patrimony of being Americans is to share the throes of a huge salad bowl of ingredients slowly being added to and changed with each new wave of intentional immigrants or fearful refugees who heard about how the streets of America were paved with gold.  I remember a member of a graduate school class who fled Hungary who could not understand the complacency of Americans in face of America's wealth and opportunity.

We can either decry our patrimony or revel in it.  We can enjoy it or try to leave it behind.  Frank McCourt used his insight into living to describe it in excruciating detail.  He asked us to take trips through his early years and see what he saw and not to be undone by what his eyes told him and his writing told us.