A Thousand Years and Then Some

Book excerpt: The story goes back to the fifth century when Saint Patrick converted the pagan Irish to Christianity. Pictures of ancient crosses are testimony to the saint's arrival in Ireland. There is a graveyard, surrounded by a stone wall, where a wheeled cross stands at the entrance and a small stone structure with a stone roof, inside the graveyard known as the skull house, it allures visitors from all over Europe year round. The stone structure is Saint Finnian's mortuary. The saint was abbot of the monastery, where monks were sent out to Europe to teach and to spread the faith. The unearthing of a beautifully inscribed slab stone in a monastery graveyard revealed the grave of Magnus, a Norseman from the isles. He was the forefather of the author's. Maternal family, the Norseman came to Ireland by way of Scotland many years ago. The book describes the lives of the author's great grandparents, grandparents and his parents before developing into a memoir, beginning with his school days in a two-room schoolhouse in Ireland and through the years of World War II. He lived with his grandparents on a farm and was hired to a farmer in the north of Ireland at the Derry rabble, a form of slavery in past years. He returned to Brooklyn and his parents in 1947. The book describes his life as a fireman as well as his son's, a member of rescue one at the sabotage of twin towers on 9/11.