Patriot Hearts Read Online Free Page B

hospital waiting to talk to him, preferably something that would help me get ahead in life and make me a success. During an earlier talk my father had said to me, “We sent you to good schools. We taught you the difference between right and wrong. You know that when something isn’t yours you shouldn’t take it and if you break something you should fix it. But all these values together aren’t going to make you a success. What’s going to separate you from the others is how hard you are prepared to work.”
    I will never forget that.
    My father died the next day, June 5, 1974. He was buried beside my cousin, Siobhan. And there would be few days in the following years when I wouldn’t see something, or hear someone talking, that didn’t make me think of him. I missed him terribly. He was just 63 years old when he died. It would take me a long time to stop feeling angry that my father’s life had been cut so short, that he’d been robbed of an opportunity to enjoy life after working so hard for so many years.
    Not long after my father’s death I was enticed by an unexpected offer. A recruiter from a high school in Prince George, British Columbia, had come to Dublin in search of someone to set up an athletic program. I was a young teacher with just two years’ experience. The job intrigued me. My cousin’s death, followed so closely by my father’s, had left me feeling a little empty, and open to new adventures. I was definitely receptive to the idea of leaving Ireland after what had happened a couple of months earlier.
    I decided to take the position, thinking I would return to Ireland in a few years.
    IT WAS A FALL DAY in 1974 when my wife and I bundled up our son and daughter and boarded a plane to Canada.
    I don’t recall much about the long haul over the Atlantic other than looking out the window occasionally at the great white expanse below and pondering just how cold it was going to be when we landed. I spent part of the flight second-guessing my decision. At one point, I pretty much convinced myself that I had made a colossal error—and I had dragged three other people along with me on this misadventure.
    But it was too late to obsess about that. Our plane touched down in Edmonton, and we approached a customs agent with our passports and a letter of introduction from the school I would be working at. I will never forget the parting words of the man who interviewed us. “Welcome to Canada,” he said as he handed me back our documents. “Make us better.”
    Soon I was in Prince George starting a new life. My job offered plenty of challenges, but I dove into it with everything I had and made some real headway in getting an athletic program up and running. I had only been at the school a couple of years when I received a call about a position with the city as director of parks and recreation. Compared with what I had been doing, this was a big leap. The city owned arenas and tennis courts among its many recreational properties. I would be in charge of them all. And I would have to deal with unions almost daily. I was 26. I got the job.
    If there was a highlight from that time it was in 1978 when I received a call from someone in the provincial government. He wanted to talk to me about the Northern BC Winter Games, which had been started a few years earlier. The Games bring together athletes from across the north to be part of a friendly competition. The government rep asked me if I’d lead a committee to restructure the event, with an eye to moving it around to different communities. In the three years since their inception, the Games had been held in Fort St. John twice and were heading for neighbouring Dawson Creek, provided we could get a new structure in place. So I took it on and with a few colleagues overhauled the structure and set the new course. It was a lot of fun.
    Prince George later followed Dawson Creek as host city, and I was handed responsibility for staging those Games. I desperately wanted