An angel sits upon the seventh step

Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes,” dies at 78 of metastatic melanoma. Ah, but what a book he left us with. As The New York Times recalls:

“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”

The book had an inauspicious beginning. He took a stab at it while studying at New York University, but didn’t hit his stride until after he retired from teaching. Again, from the NYT:

“After 20 pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child,” he told The Providence Journal in 1997. “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”

McCourt, who certainly had every reason to lack a sense of humor, said it was exactly that which keeps the Irish going.

“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.”

Sure works for me. May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead, Francis McCourt. Tell Harold Joseph O’Grady of County Clare to buy yous a pint on Patrick Declan O’Grady so.