by Tom Deignan

THE gravest sin any columnist can make is to make the column, on any given week, about the columnist himself.

I was thinking about this when I was contacted last week by Robert Snyder, a man who knows a thing or two about the New York Irish, and also a close friend of Frank Carvill, the beloved New Jersey Irish American whose wake was held this past week.

Carvill, a National Guard reservist, was killed in Iraq. He was 51.

Snyder contacted me to tell me that he had received a letter from Carvill not long after he was killed, which included a “Sidewalks” column published a few months back. The column focused on the Good Shepherd’s Men’s Club, an organization based in Inwood, the formerly Irish uptown Manhattan neighborhood.

Of course, the place has changed, but the point of the column was that the Good Shepherd’s Men’s Club, still largely Irish American, was still working to improve opportunities for students at the parish school.

It was a fine column, because these were fine men doing fine work.

Frank Carvill, however, sent it along to Robert Snyder because he knew that Snyder specialized in issues relating to the uptown Irish. Check out Snyder’s wonderfully informative essay “The Neighborhood Changed: The Irish of Washington Heights and Inwood since 1945” in the indispensable book The New York Irish, edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher. I’ve consulted in many times.

As Snyder told me, this was very typical of Carvill. He was still deeply immersed in the Irish community, even halfway around the world in Iraq. He was still thinking about his friends, and so he sent along, to Snyder, an article he thought might be of use to him sometime down the road.

Finally, he was thinking about New York, and about an Irish neighborhood that had become increasingly Hispanic, a change, Snyder said, Carvill did not reject, but instead found fascinating.

When put this way, you see just how unimportant the column itself was, and how very important this particular reader was.

That all being said, I must confess that when Snyder told this to me, it was easily one of the most touching moments I’ve ever experienced as a columnist.

Needless to say, working as a weekly columnist can turn one into a cynic. You wonder who is reading this stuff you tap into a computer and then send out into the world.

You sometimes listen to quotes you know are utterly false, yet you must get them in there because your job is to make sure that every voice is heard.

And then Frank Carvill – whose Dad was from Armagh and whose mother was from Cork – goes ahead and reads your work somewhere in Iraq. Then send it along to a friend in New York.

You simply wish you could have heard about this under better circumstances.

But the other thing easy to get cynical about is the whole notion of a single “Irish community.” It’s easy to point out the monumental differences between third-generation Irish Americans in Bay Ridge or Mineola and recently-arrived Irish immigrants in Sunnyside or Woodlawn, not to mention, you know, that entire country of Irish folks across the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s easy to convince yourself that, really, these millions have nothing in common, not religion or geography – certainly not politics.

And then Frank Carvill posts a letter to a friend from Iraq.

And by the way, I have no doubts Carvill was also reading the Irish Echo, and whatever other Irish publications he could get his hands on.

You realize that the specifics don’t matter so much as the fact that Frank Carvill proved there is, at a fundamental level, such thing as an “Irish Community.” Most importantly, he did it while he was alive. And to hear his friends, such as Robert Snyder, tell it, he did this as often as he could in all 51 of his years.

There is no doubt he would have continued had he not been so brave, and called to build up the Irish community in another, better place.

Contact Sidewalks at tdeignan@irishvoice.com.