Dave Stebbins, a twenty-four year old Professor of English Literature at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque was well-liked, organizer of a faculty drama group and an avid skier. In December of 1969, he and his girlfriend drove up to Taos to enjoy a weekend of skiing. Shortly after exiting Lift 2, he began his run and a hundred yards down lost a ski and crashed into the snow-covered stump of a tree. After months of rehabilitation following hip replacement surgeries, he is invited by his uncle and cousin to convalesce in Monaco where the uncle is European representative for John Deere Tractors.

He arrives at their villa consumed with self-pity at the loss of his virility and athleticism and his cousin tries to help him regain his self-confidence by involving him with his friends at a Monte Carlo Beach Club. Weeks pass in Riviera fun and Dave meets Elena Varelas, a Greek girl blinded from a water-skiing accident off Mykonos and begins to lose his crutch of self-pity in his evolving love for her. He ends his convalescence and accompanies the Varelas family to Palm Beach where she will have experimental laser treatment for her traumatic optic neuropathy. If successful, they will wed and return to Albuquerque where he will resume his teaching career.

“COWERS OF THE COUNTY”
“IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER…BLUFF IT!”©

I thought of those oft-spoken words of my father as I stood alone at his flower-covered grave an hour after the funeral service. The words seemed to sum up his life. A carpenter’s apprentice, he fled Belfast for America in the aftermath of the bloodbaths of the ‘20’s and at the age of seventeen, bluffed his way into a job at the Percy & Small Shipyard in Bath Maine and into becoming head of the union. He bluffed his way into marrying the daughter of a state senator and into amassing a fortune as he obtained the respect and homage he never found in Ireland.

He thought of himself as a hero…an Irish patriot…the embodiment of a reincarnated Brian Boru. A savior of the Ireland he so badly wanted to see united. With his money and connections, he envisioned himself as the originator of a financial pipeline from the American Irish to the IRA. He would spend his morning hours plotting money-raising schemes and his afternoons socializing at ‘The Club.”

The club in downtown Portland was ‘THE COUNTY.’ It was to be the final solution for his Irishness. It was really begun for me…Rory Cowers. It was to be my power base and stepping stone to political success. First I would be elected Mayor of Portland and next a State Representative. Eventually I would be elected to the United States Senate…and this is where Daddo’s dream became wishful lunacy. I would become Governor of the 51st state in America. Ireland.

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