"The Old Man and Me Columns: Alaskan Stories of Hope", is a book of very short stories about a mentor therapist, an Old Man, who is a bit of a curmudgeon, and his mentee.
These two therapists, one old, one middle aged, are two psychotherapists in the business of helping others with life's challenges, big and small.
The problems the therapists and their patients face in these stories scan the full range of human experiences, including young love, marital conflict, child rearing, child and adolescent and adult problems including serious abuse and trauma, as well as coping with difficult holiday and seasonal stresses.
These stories are full of compassion, advice and wisdom with a bit of humor thrown in. Such is the story of life, a little pain, a little joy, a little humor, a little hope and a lot of hard work.
The Old Man and Me Columns, began as a column the author wrote for "The Palmer Frontiersman", and "The Valley Sun", newspapers in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, Alaska, beginning in the mid 1970s and continued until the mid 1980s.
The author's chosen profession was Clinical Social Work until he retired in 1999. The author worked in the field of mental health with children, adolescents and adults, who were confronted with challenges in life situations, relationships and trauma of one kind or another.
At the time these columns were written, Mr. Fallon worked in private practice as a psychotherapist. He wanted to write a column in story form that readers might find interesting and helpful in coping with life's problems. He also hoped that the column would help ameliorate the stigma associated with seeking and receiving mental health services.
As a boy and a teenager, the author was an avid reader of outdoor hunting and fishing adventures. The inspiration for the Old Man and Me column came from a book that he loved by Robert Ruark titled, "The Old Man and the Boy".
The stories in Robert Ruark's book centered around a grandson talking about his grandfather who, in stories and anecdotes layered with love, imparts wisdom and philosophy to his grandson. "The Old Man and the Boy", was first published in 1953 and continues to be in print to this day.
The Old Man in the Old Man and Me columns, like the Old Man in Ruark's stories, had the benefit of his age and life experiences in his mentoring of his mentee, a younger psychotherapist. Old Man in these stories is a bit of a sage, even a wizard, as the author writes in his first introductory column. But the Old Man is also a bit of a curmudgeon who can be prickly in his mentoring and in his work. But more than anything, Old Man, like the Old Man in Ruark's book, is full of great love and humanity.
In publishing this book of columns, it is the author's hope that apart from the help the reader might get from the stories themselves, the stories will, like it has done for the author, begin a lasting and warm relationship with this Old Man.
The author is a retired psychotherapist and author of "Toward Capernaum, Toward Hope: The Hidden Years", and "Joyous Dance: Akaskan Spirit Guide", who lived and worked in Alaska 37 years. He now lives in Idaho with his wife Elizabeth Fallon, author of "The Moonlit Moose: An Alaskan Tale".