An Excerpt from Teacher Man

by Frank McCourt

Listen. Are you listening? You’re not listening. I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing.

            Every moment of you life, you’re writing. Even in your dreams you’re writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head. There’s the principal. You have to make a decision, a greeting decision. Will you nod? Will you smile? Will you say, Good morning, Mr. Baumel? Or will you simply say, Hi? You see someone you dislike. Furious writing again in your head. Decision to be made. Turn your ahead away? Stare as you pass? Nod? Hiss a Hi? You see someone you like and you say, Hi, in a warm melting way, a Hi that conjures up splash of oars, soaring violins, eyes shining in the moonlight. There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore.

            I’ll do this as a male because women, for me, still remain the great mystery. I could tell you stories. Are you listening? There’s a girl in this school you’ve fallen in love with. You happen to know she’s broken up with someone else so the field is clear. You’d like to go out with her. Oh, the writing now sizzles in your head. You might be one of those cool characters who could saunter up to Helen of Troy and ask her what she’s doing after the siege, that you know a nice lamb-and-ouzo place in the ruins of Ilium. The cool character, the charmer, doesn’t have to prepare much of a script. The rest of us are writing. You call her to see if she’ll go out with you on Saturday night. You’re nervous. Rejection will lead you to the edge of the cliff, the overdose. You tell her, on the phone, you’re in her physics class. She says, doubtfully, Oh, yeah. You ask if she’s busy Saturday night. She’s busy. She has something planned, but you suspect she’s lying. A girl cannot admit she has nothing to do on a Saturday night. It would be un-American. She has to put on the act. God, what would the world say? You, writing in your head, ask about the following Saturday night and all the other Saturdays stretching into infinity. You’ll settle for anything, you poor little schmuck, anything as long as you can see her before you start collecting Social Security. She plays her little game, tells you call her again next week and she’ll see. Yeah, she’ll see. She sits home on Saturday night watching TV with her mother and Aunt Edna, who never shuts up. You sit home Saturday night with your mother and father, who never say anything. You go to bed and dream that next week, oh, God, next week she might say yes and if she does you have it all planned, that cute little Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue with the red and white checked tablecloth and the Chianti bottles holding those dripping white candles.

            Dreaming, wishing, planning: it’s all writing, but the difference between you and the man on the street is that you are looking at it, friends, getting it set in your head, realizing the significance of the insignificant, getting it on paper. You might be in the throes of love of grief but you are ruthless in observation. You are your material. You are writers and one thing is certain: no matter what happens on Saturday night, or any other night, you’ll never be bored again. Never. Nothing human is alien to you. Hold your applause and pass up your homework.

            I said, you know the ingredients of the McCourt life. You have your ingredients, too, what you’ll use if you write about your life. List your ingredients in your notebook. Cherish them. This is urgent. Jewish. Middle class. New York Times. Classical music on radio. Harvard on the horizon. Chinese. Korean. Italian. Spanish. A foreign-language newspaper on the kitchen table. Ethnic music pouring out of the radio. Parents dream of trips to the Old Country. Grandmother, sitting silent in the corner of the living room, remembers glimpses of cemeteries in Queens. Thousands of headstones and crosses. Begs: please, please, don’t put me there. Take me to China. Please. So, sit with your grandmother. Let her tell her story. All the grandmothers and grandfathers have stories and if you let them die without taking down their stories you are criminal. Your punishment is banishment from the school cafeteria.

            Yeah. Haw, haw.

            Parents and grandparents are suspicious of this sudden interest in their lives. Why you asking me so many questions? My life is nobody’s business, and what I did I did.

            What did you do?

            Nobody’s business. Is it that teacher again? Stickin’ his nose in?

            No, Grandma. I just thought you’d want to tell me about your life so I can tell my kids and they can tell their kids and you won’t be forgotten.

            You tell that teacher mind his own business. All these Americans the same, always asking questions. We got privacy in this family.

            But, Grandma, this teacher is Irish.

            Oh, yeah? Well, they’re the worst, always talking and singing about green things or getting shot and hung.

            Others come in with stories of how they ask the elders one question about the past and the dam bursts and the old people won’t stop talking, going on till bedtime and beyond, expressing heartache and tears, yearnings for the Old Country, declaring love for America. Family relationships are rearranged. Grandpa isn’t taken for granted by sixteen-year-old Milton anymore.

            In World War II Grandpa had adventures you wouldn’t believe. Like he fell in love with the daughter of an SS officer and nearly got killed for it. Grandpa escaped and had to hide in the whaddya-call-it of a cow in a garbage dump.

            The hide?

            Yeah. The only reason the hide was there was it already half eaten by rats and he had to fight them off. Three days in the hide fighting off rats till a Catholic priest saw him and hid him under his church till the Americans came a year later. All these years Grandpa sits in the corner and I never talked to him and he never talked to me. His English still isn’t good but that’s no excuse. Now I have him on me tape recorder and my parents, my parents for Christ’s sakes, are saying, Why bother?