The Foggy Dew Back Story

Some back story on my ‘The Foggy Dew’ short story.

In July, Susan and I traveled to Scotland and Ireland. Our coach driver had just retired after 34 years as an officer (Guarda) near Galway. We met in the first hotel’s pub and immediately bonded, although he’s probably young enough to be my son, because I’m as old as dirt.

We had choir practice (telling war stories) each night and I told him of my memoir. We became Facebook friends one of those first nights, and that night while lying in bed, I wrote my daily Twitter #vss365 story. I picked the topic of a young girl’s death. I seem to do my best work on dark subjects.

The next morning as I’m sipping my first cup of coffee, I see he wrote a poem on his page that night, probably as I was writing mine. He is an excellent poet by the way.

I read his poem. It was to his daughter on the fourth anniversary of her death at 19.

I was horrified thinking of what I had written, knowing he was probably somewhere in the hotel reading mine.

Dripping in cold sweat, I apologized to him minutes later in the lobby.

“Never worry about that, Jeff. I liked your story.”

To make this long story shorter, his daughter, Jessica died tragically, but before her death, she recorded several songs which her dad published on a CD.

He mailed it to me and the first track is called The Foggy Dew, an Irish traditional folk song about love and war. It is beautifully haunting, and it inspired my story, ‘The Foggy Dew.’

I have at least two more chapters of this story in the works. They will be titled, The Troubles, and The House of MacDuff