Michelle McGrath

Last night we had dinner with my friend Michelle McGraff and her husband John. This was our first face to face meeting since our conversations previously have all been through email exchanges. Michelle was instrumental in my rewriting my original story and releasing "World War 1 - An Unkept Promise". She is an accomplished author with a background in historical writing. Through the website, Goodreads, she reviewed my first book, "The Great Promise". She only gave it three stars because I didn't have a bibliography to give credit to my sources. I questioned her review because the story was not meant to be non-fiction and I didn't believe that I needed to give credit because my information was obtained from many sources and not limited to a couple of sources. Long story short, we got into a discussion through emails and she convinced me to rewrite the story as non-fiction. She tricked me into believing that it would take long since I was so close anyway - will, eight months later I finally finished it except the last chapter.

The restaurant was crowed so it was very noisy making it difficult to hear each other's conversations; we did the best we could  under the circumstances.

John was balding and had white hair which matched his beard that was neatly trimmed. Wearing a Navy blue sport coat with an opened collar yellow dress shirt. At first meeting he seemed to be a pleasant man suffering the same problem with hearing as myself.

I inquired about his work and discovered he did something in health and safety. Whatever it was, he stated that he finally found his life's calling after 66 years,

Michelle was sitting across from Lynne, my wife, so it was very difficult to distinguish what she was saying. I did get the message that she was pleased that I decided to rewrite the book because she believed that the journal should was important and should be read by those interested in learning about the war. I also gleaned from our conversation that I should expect to receive criticism from other historians and not to take them to heart. That the journal will stand on its own for what it is and regardless if they agree with what it says, it was written as he experienced it.

She made one comment that I was lucky to be having dinner with them because my grandfather, according to his journal, missed death on several occasions. I replied she was right, but there was the event of my grandfather deciding which country to immigrate to based upon the flip of a coin. Lucky for me it came up America or we wouldn't have been having this conversation.

The restaurant was very popular - I have to say the food was excellent, so they had a two hour time limit in order to turn over tables. Our time was up so I paid the bill - I thought it only fair for the time Michelle had spent on helping me. We left and looked for another place to have some desert, a place a little quieter. I remembered one where Lynne and I had dinner so we went there. The place was so much quieter than where we had dinner, that is until a large group of people came in.

Lynne and I discovered that Michelle and John lived on the island of Man, which is in the Irish sea between Ireland and Scotland. It is a separate country which is a dependent upon the United Kingdom. However, it has its own monetary system, passport, laws and such just like any other independent country. Even though it is a dependency of the Royal Crown, it is not a member of the UK.

Time was growing late so we made plans to meet the following day but Sunday morning Lynne was in pain with a fibromyalga attack and I was having Parkinson's issues so we cancelled. We want to make sure we can make the meeting with the WFA group on Monday.