When Rosie's son met Angela's son -- on Frank McCourt

Long before "A Million Little Pieces" triggered new rules for memoir writing -- at least most or at least the best parts must be true -- "Angela's Ashes" charmed me and millions of other readers around the world. It was Frank McCourt's masterful telling of Angela's son growing up extremely hungry in Limerick, Ireland.

I loved that book, and put aside a lingering sense that much of it was just made up, especially the farcical description of Frank's arrival as a young man in New York. I put aside my scruples and just loved the story, the language and the blend of misery and comedy: it was pitch perfect.

McCourt, who died last weekend, told the story through the eyes of a boy who only partially took in the anguish and desperation of his mother. To feed her children, she even took to sleeping with a brutish relative.

"Angela's Ashes" provided a reminder to the descendants of Irish immigrants just why people left the Old Sod: it was miserable to have no work and no future. People had to leave. McCourt told that part with a special twist: his family came to America but returned to Ireland because his drunken father failed to keep gainful employment in the U.S. Back in Ireland, McCourt's father wandered off and Angela made do.

McCourt became celebrated as a great authority on all things Irish and his book tours brought out crowds of well wishing Irish Americans -- except for my dad who complained bitterly about McCourt and went to an event with me in Seattle just to tell him off. McCourt had committed the Unforgiveable Sin, in my dad's estimation: telling tales on your mother. And it was true: McCourt like many other writers had betrayed his mother for the sake of the story he wanted to tell. Or sell, as my dad might have said.

So sometime after "Angela's Ashes" came out, McCourt came to Seattle for an event at epicenter of all things Irish here, F.X. McRory's. I entered with my dad who began to chat people up about the disloyalty of McCourt and the outrage of his writing. The highlight of the moment was my conversation with McCourt in which he failed to hear my dad's running commentary.

I knew why my dad was angry. His own mother lost her husband (to an accident) and she raised her children during the Depression in Philadelphia with the meager wages she earned as a hotel maid. During this time, my dad and his brother Frank went door to door selling vegetables using a cart pulled by a horse named Peaches.

Though she never reached Angela's level of desperation, Rose McLaughlin Corr put two of her sons in a Philadelphia orphanage so they could be educated. One of those sons was my Dad, who remained close to his mother throughout his life, even after he settled in Seattle where he had met a former Potlatch Queen who had become a Navy nurse. As a little boy, I sat next to my dad when the phone rang and he got word that his mother had died. A few minutes into the conversation, I realized what he was hearing and suddenly I sensed the boy in the man beside me. The grief seemed to fill the room. To this day, I don't think I had observed another human being with such intensity.

So my dad just couldn't read "Angela's Ashes" as I had. And I understood.

Update: A former student of McCourt says he had an astonishing memory.

Remembering Kathleen Corr on Mother's Day

Kathleen "Tot" Corr

1921-1995

My mom died in 1995, after a long and withering battle with colon cancer. She died in bed at home.

As an adult, I had a great relationship with both of my parents. I could go to them separately about different matters. Mom was the practical one, the problem solver who cut through the distractions and pushed me in the right way.

Raising five sons (brothers Pat and Chris not yet born when this photo was taken) certainly was not her first choice in life. In another era, she would have been a prominent figure in business and law. Trained as an R.N. at Seattle University, she and my dad both applied to law school at Gonzaga but didn't go because she got in but he did not.

As a mom, and one of five female siblings, with each pregnancy she badly wanted a daughter. Much, much later, I asked her how she felt that in 1955 again no daughter had emerged but instead a son -- me, her first red head. "Oh, I cried," she said.

Once I ran away, of a sorts, by taking the bus to the University District to observe the sidewalk hippies. She somehow found me and when I got into the car, I saw she had been in tears. I mattered to her, and I felt guilty that I had caused her suffering. In an odd sense, it was the first time I ever saw her as not just my mom but a person of real feelings whom I loved.

The greatest gift any parent can give is unconditional love and to this day there are issues I wish could share with her.

During her illness in 1995, I was working on a book so I had the schedule flexibility to visit her every day in the hospital. Watching this strong woman grow weaker was the most painful thing of my life, matched only by seeing the same thing happen to my father 10 years later.

Her death gained notice in The Seattle Times and was marked by one of those classic big Irish Catholic family masses: a crowd of priests, a packed church, and a wake at our house where one friend, an immigrant from Ireland got so drunk he began to sob which somehow caused his nose to bleed, dribbling red on a brother's white dress shirt. At first, I felt embarrassed, then amused: Tot would have liked a gathering that included all the elements of the Irish wake, especially the drunken episode that had really bothered no one.

After her death, a lot of people spoke to me about how much they admired her. She powered a lot of personal and group organizations. She pushed my dad to a professional level where he accomplished significant things for our city. One of her friends told me how much she missed her and how much she had loved her. "She was such a tiny person," the friend said. Tiny? I thought. I never though of her as short, though she was probably 5'2". So she was tiny, but she always felt big in my life. I miss her terribly.