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Making
things happen - with integrity. A Weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, January 17, 2000 Volume II Number 3
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FOCUS - Stock Your Mind
Hoppy O’Halloran, Headmaster of the Leamy’s National School in Limerick, is Frankie’s seventh grade teacher. He is a small man – with a big heart.
He’s got a short leg. That’s why he sits. Most of the time.
Late 1930s poverty in Ireland is cruel. There is no work for Frank’s father. Whatever money ends up in his fist gets consumed at the Pub as Irish whiskey or pints of Stout sometime before the sun rises the following morning. The upstairs flat Frank shares with his mother and two brothers (they call it Italy) is austere. But it is a warm and dry refuge from the cold and damp downstairs (they call it Ireland) where rats and stench and squalor and flooding make the first floor of this Georgian house on Roden Lane virtually uninhabitable. Two other brothers die of common childhood diseases that tragically worsen; brutal fatalities caused by the complications of ordinary, garden-variety starvation. Each death entirely preventable. Back in depression ravaged Brooklyn, Frank’s sister Margaret dies in her mother’s arms. She is seven weeks old.
There are six McCourt children in all. Two brothers and a sister are dead in their first few years. The cause is poverty.
Frank is born in America. But joblessness and alcohol and Margaret’s death and despair all prompt Frank’s parents to return to their native Ireland to find a better life. It isn’t. Frankie is four when they make the voyage across the Atlantic. He waves good-bye to Lady Liberty as they depart New York.
By the time Frank is sixty-six, he writes a memoir. He tells the story of those childhood days. It’s a hard life, but it is all he knows. Today, he is a retired high school English teacher. Back in America.
From the slums of Limerick to a distinguished career in education… how does THAT happen?
Hoppy O’Halloran has the secret.
Frankie is curious. When he hears a word he doesn’t understand, he goes to the Limerick Library and takes the dictionary off the shelf. There’s an old man, recently blinded, who pays Frank a couple shillings for reading novels out loud. Frank learns about far away places – adventures with the Foreign Legion, and Gulliver’s Travels and American cowboys. He sneaks into the Lyric Cinema to watch Fred Astaire and James Cagney dance and shoot their way to fame and fortune. When Frankie was in the hospital fighting typhoid, his aunt visits and reads Shakespeare aloud – every lyrical word and phrase is a treasure. She passes along her love of language. Later, a neighbor turns up the volume of his wireless loud enough to hear the radio drama from the street. These are windows on a world way beyond Limerick.
Mr. O’Halloran entertained his seventh grade class with the stories of literature he loved. Frank learns a trick. When O’Halloran got lost in some boring algebra or Irish grammar, Frank would raise his hand and ask a question about America – the teacher would readily drop the math or grammar and spin stories of his favorite tribes and heroes – the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Sioux; and Kicking Bear, Rain-in-the-Face, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo. He goes on for the rest of the day. “Poetry, my boys, poetry,” he says.
Frank says, “We wonder how one small head could carry all he knows.”
O’Halloran repeated the secret over and again to his class of twelve-year-olds. He handed his students the golden key - “Ah boys, boys, you can make up your own minds, but first stock them. Are you listening to me? Stock your minds and you can move through the world resplendent.”
Stock your minds and you can move through the world resplendent.
Young Frank lives in unimaginable deprivation. His father is so hopelessly addicted to alcohol he cannot keep himself from the Pub. When he comes home drunk late at night, they all say, “You drank the money, didn’t you?” There is nothing left for his wife and children. His mother’s depression and grief and anger debilitate her. Her only refuge is sleep.
But Frankie, early on, stocks his mind. He outsmarts the fates. And today, he moves through the world resplendent.
His
memoir wins a Pulitzer Prize. Hollywood makes his story a high budget, feature length
motion picture. He bags a big
advance to write the sequel. The
memoir is a tribute to a suffering mother, Angela, who lived to protect her
children. Frank McCourt calls his
book Angela’s Ashes. At
this writing, six million copies are in print - in twenty-five languages.
Hoppy O’Halloran is famous.
* * * * * * *
I picked up the phone just this week. Justin reported in. “I’ve been accepted!”
Alright!
I met Justin about four years ago, just after he buried his father. Justin’s dad suffered a long time, mainly from the ill effects of diabetes. It was a slow, agonizing decline.
Justin’s mom, some years before, left for another man. Justin, the only child, was all his dad had left.
When we met, he wasn’t looking for sympathy. He loved his father. He was there with him to the end. He couldn’t talk about it much. Too painful. Dad left him with a truckload of memories, clear instructions on how he ought to live his life and a tidy sum of cash. And securities.
Like any twenty-one year old might, he could have tapped into this windfall, rewarding himself for the care he gave his ailing father. Several prime time years were erased from his young life. While his friends were dating and turning out college credits, he tended to the needs of his isolated dad whose health was failing. Most people would expect, without parental restriction, Justin might well show up with a deep rumbling, wide tire, sparkling new car. A rented beach condo. Winters in Steamboat Springs. Summers in Maui. All the toys.
If he had given into the temptation to squander the inheritance, by now it would be gone. Zero balance. Accounts closed.
But the money’s still there. It’s been four years.
Back then, Justin told me what he wanted. At the time he was making $7 an hour working in a day-care center. He wanted a real career. A good marriage. A lifetime partner. A real home. A place in the community. Kids. He pictured himself someday pulling into the parking lot of the church, Mom and Dad herding the little rascals decked out for Sunday School. Greeting his friends. That’s what he wanted.
“You’ll need that college degree,” I told him.
“I know. But my high school grades aren’t very good.”
His dream then was to get himself accepted at the State University. They told him he should go to community college and prove his academic capabilities. Come back with credits and grades they said.
That’s exactly what Justin did. And this week, on the other end of the telephone, in his hand he held a letter signed by the Dean of the Engineering Department at State – “I’m pleased to inform you that your application has been accepted for the next semester.”
Justin stocked his mind with the right things. He read the books. Wrote the papers. Passed the exams. Associated with good people. Honored his God and the memory of his father.
Justin will be an engineer. A good one. And the other stuff will come along, too.
* * * * * * *
What is the stock you are placing on the shelves of your mind?
Is it deliberate? Intentional? Or are you passively allowing someone else to lift and load and rotate the goods that get stored in your mind and heart?
I’ve got an eighty-three year old mentor who has an active, fertile, positive mind. His career long discipline was to read a good book every week. He’s written over fifty books himself. It’s a mind well stocked.
You don’t need to do a lot in this information age. Sit passively by and there will be plenty to load you up, and shape your thinking, your values, your self-concept and your place in the world. You know the sources – books, magazines, radio, TV and now the Internet.
But when you take control, you have access to the best of the best. You can choose what you read. What you process. What you watch. What you listen to. Where you click.
Make it good.
Hoppy O’Halloran had it right. Frankie McCourt took note. Justin made it happen. We can, too.
“Boys (girls), stock your minds and you can move through the world resplendent.”
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (Touchstone 1999)
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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