I was flipping through an old magazine and came across and article on the genesis of one of my favorite phrases: "It is what it is."   Recently I gave some t-shirts to friends with the same phrase on it, a quote from one of my favorite authors, Jack Kerouac, who once reportedly defended his bad behavior with a simple, "It is what it is, and I am what I am". 

 Kerouac was actually a close friend of my family, and he grew up in the same town as my parents in Lowell, Massachusetts.  In high school, my mother’s brother and cousin were two of Kerouac’s best friends, and after both of them died in World War II, he memorialized them with mentions in "The Town and the City", a book about Lowell.  Later in life, he came back to Lowell and became close friends with another uncle and married Stella Sampas, another of my mother’s cousins.    If you’ve never read Kerouac’s "On the Road", I can only say that it’s one of those books that can change your life.  It did mine