I cannot remember when I wasn’t "Daddy's girl." I grew up with two older brothers and their friends, and I could hold my own, whether it was kicking a football or batting in runs. I was never the last one picked for a team. Sometimes we would play hide-and-seek, and the boys wouldn’t bother to come find me, but that only slowed me down a little.

My mother tried in vain to smooth out my rough edges. It was always my Daddy who walked me up the front steps of the school each time I had to be reinstated. I never started a fight, but I finished them all.

When someone shouted, “Jimmy got his Irish up,” everyone knew that trouble was just around the corner. As Irish as Daddy was, and as proud as he was of it, he never got to visit what he called, “his homeland.”

Eight months after becoming a widow, I visited my younger brother, living in Dublin. I didn’t want to go anywhere I had been with Bob and our children, so Dennis took me to Galway. Our second day there, we took a tour in a 1949 Bedford bus.  During those four (five hours in Irish time) hours I came to terms with the death of my husband of 46 years and also with my father who had been dead for fifteen years.

“The Connemara Bus: A Journey Through the Past in Ireland” is an account of my emotional journey on the bus, the bus driver, his grandfather, and western Ireland. The book comfortably nestled into the number one spot on the Galway-Eason’s best-seller list only four days after we launched it. I did not feel entitled to take the proceeds of the book out of Ireland, so I started a business in County Galway, in the parish of Moycullen, in the townland of Tullykyne. 

“Irish Reflections” is a collection of my experiences that followed the first book.  You can walk with me as I learned to: start a business in a foreign country; earn my stripes at the local pub; get my car insured even though I was over the seventy-years-of-age limit; pass the first driver's test I had ever taken in my life, even though I was sitting on the wrong side of the car, driving on the wrong side of the road, and had the gearshift in the wrong hand.  You will read how we hung together on 9/11, being sequestered on our airplane for 29 hours, then spending five days in Lewisporte, Newfoundland.