The Story behind the Story

After high school my son, Tim, and his best friend John Doyle (called just ‘Doyle’ ) saved enough money for a trip to Europe.   Doyle had relatives living in Ireland and their plan was to make their farm home base and make excursions from there.

The plan worked for about two months, they tried to get green cards to get odd jobs and extend their stay.  The world was in the midst of an economic depression and Ireland didn’t feel the need to have two Americans wandering their island taking the odd job.  As a result they ran out of money.  Once day I received a call from Tim, he needed $500 to get a flight home.  I wired him the money and within a week he and Doyle were back in Wisconsin looking for a job.

As part of his thank you for bailing him out of Ireland, Tim brought me a stack of Irish newspapers.  He thought I would enjoy reading papers from Ireland.  I’ve never understood what gave him that notion but it caused a euphoric moment for me.  In 1997 Ireland was still a year away from approving the Good Friday Agreement that ended The Troubles.  The papers carried stories of civil violence and atrocities.

One story in particular caught my attention.  A ten year old girl was maimed in a ‘peace zone’ in Belfast.  The government had created areas between the walls that separate Catholics and Protestants that were neutral zones where no violence was to take place.  Neither the Protestants nor the Catholics accepted the peace zones because they were imposed on them from the British government.

From that story I began to imagine what it would feel like for a family to have their daughter injured while just playing outside – being in the wrong place and the wrong time.  That became the major incident that I built the story of Murphy’s Troubles around.

In the front cover of Murphy’s Troubles in the Appreciation Section I thank Tim for bringing me those newspapers.