I grew up in a small village in Ireland as the youngest of four children where reading by the fire became a way to escape the cold and misery of winter evenings as opposed to being sent off to bed in a cold dark bedroom. By the time I reached age twelve our village had its own lending library where I started with Enid Bylton's books before moving on to Arthur Conan Doyle, Frank O'Connor and P.G.Wodehouse. Once into the world these books opened to me I was never far from a book during the first part of my adult life to age thirty five. After marriage and family reading time became more difficult and had to be planned carefully. But for all the years I can remember I loved hearing stories, all kinds of stories that have somehow stuck in my memory with little trouble on my part. In 1962 I left Ireland and came to California where I have lived ever since. Ten years ago when all the bad stuff about the Catholic Church began to surface I decided to offer another perspective. And so "Mal's Hard Landing" began to take shape in the story of the naive young people a lot of us were who came here with dreams about moving mountains only to find it's very hard to move even a little hill when all you have is a teaspoon. And so, far from bad stuff, Mal's story is about the family he left behind and his stumbling around that first year in California trying to survive in a life like nothing he anticipated or for which he prepared.

I have somehow managed to live sixty nine years during which time, I have studied philosophy, theology before going on to a great thirty years with the State of California specializing in gerontology and geriatrics, which is really beginning to pay off these days now that I'm moving toward seventy.