sometimes

Sometimes I don't know why I do the things I do. That's not true. I know why I recorded Angela's Ashes. I felt guilty for not reading the book. I am a literate girl (how old can you get before you're not a girl anymore? Will I still be a girl when I'm eighty?) and the idea of a Book of Some Importance that I haven't read is bothersome. Everything I know about Frank McCourt comes from a former co-worker of mine who is his niece. There's nothing at all romantic about poverty. My parents and grandparents had to survive things that make my worst day look like a picnic. You wake up one morning and your mother's gone to pawn the last of the family silver to feed your eight brothers and sisters. You wake up one morning and you're dying in a Soviet hospital because they've botched an operation which is standard throughout the United States. You come home from the war and your entire family is gone, buried in a mass grave just outside of town. It's not that I think McCourt found poverty romantic, not in the least, but I suspect his readers did. There is nothing quite like American sympathy for the Irish Troubles, the way we drink their beer and fake their accents because we think that their troubles are part of some great epic tapestry, so very unlike our own. It rains all through Angela's Ashes. It's either raining or about to rain. It rains and then somebody dies (a child, if at all possible), then it rains some more and McCourt's father comes home drunk. I almost couldn't stand it, so much nasty unrelenting sogginess, but I watched even though I knew that thing would never get better, that Angela's life would never improve, that there would always be some new indignity around the corner. It was a slow, sad car crash, but I'm sure I could have looked away if I wanted to