For the last several weeks, whenever I'm driving in my car, I've been listening to Angela's Ashes on CD. It's a book I've had on my bookshelf for years, but just hadn't gotten around to reading it.
I'm glad I waited so that the author, Frank McCourt, could read it to me in his Irish accent -- I'm loving his graphic and at once depressing and uplifting recounting of his impoverished Irish childhood.
Talk about finding love in a hopeless place -- the book bears witness to the agony of having a drunk father:
Must it take a life for hateful eyes
To glisten once again
Five hundred years like Gelignite
Have blown us all to hell
What savior rests while on his cross we die
Forgotten freedom burns
Has the Shepard led his lambs astray
to the bigot and the gun
Must it take a life for hateful eyes
To glisten once again
Cause we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singin' drunken lullabies
...who does indeed sing drunken lullabies, but also captures the humanity of said father (and the rest of the family) in a really lovely way.
Every time I listen to it, I feel both grateful for what I have and what I'm able to offer my children, and for books' capability of transporting us to a different time and place and teaching us lessons through the power of storytelling...
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