Gleason - Chef interrupted: discovering lifes second course in Ireland with multiple sclerosis

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Coffeetown Press

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Seattle, WA 98127

For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

www.trevislgleason.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

While all the stories in this book are true, some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

Cover design by Sabrina Sun

Photographs by Manuela Agner

Chef Interrupted

Copyright 2015 by Sapphire Solutions Consulting, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-60381-301-3 (Trade Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-302-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014955969

Produced in the United States of America

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To Herself, Herself, and Herself

The one who first brought my heart to Ireland

The one who stole my heart in Ireland

And the one who was waiting for my heart and brought it back to Ireland

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L iving with multiple sclerosis (MS) has made me live my life in fast forward, but first there was an adjustment period. The events Im about to recount transpired nearly five years after my diagnosisfive years during which more adjustment was required than I prefer to recall. In that time, the career with which Id identified myself was ripped away, a strong marriage crumbled, and a subsequent relationship faltered as I stumbled through the ruins of my former life.

I came to realize that MS is not a death sentence; its a life sentence, and while anyone could step into the street and be hit by a bus, people living with MS have seen the bus. Weve been hit by the bus and we know that for the rest of our lives we will walk along the bus routewith our backs to traffic.

With the help of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, a crack rehab-psychologist, and management skills gleaned from kitchen jobs around the country, I cleared away the rubble of my old life and found a new and hopeful path to tread, albeit a misty one. Through that mist, it is impossible to see ones future.

Multiple sclerosis doesnt steal away our futures; it steals what we thought and expected to await us in our futures. My bright flash of the obvious was that my retirement years werent going to find me seventy years old, in a canoe, fishing in some pond in Vermont. MS had already stolen much of my control of my left side, attacked my vision, and evenshowing the true bastard of itselftaken away elements of my sense of taste on a number of occasions.

If I was to enjoy any of the things Id hoped to be doing in my far advanced years after a career, I would have to start identifying what those dreams were and create a plan to make them happen.

Hope, without a plan, is just a dream.

The moment to which this whole, whacky dream of an idea can be traced is Saint Patricks Day, 1977. Grade 5, West Elementary School .

On that day in a working-class suburb of a small Michigan city, my grade school teacher, one Mrs. Ilene Magee, set in motion a series of eventsboth real and imaginedthat led to a sleepless flight into a dark north Atlantic night. Belongings packed, apartment sublet, I would head out to pursue the next phase of my life, which would begin with a one hundred and eighty year old stone cottage leased for the winter in the fabled fields of forty shades of green.

The first time I made the connection between my move home to Ireland and Classroom #107 was as my former live-in girlfriend, Beth, and I drove from the railroad terminus in Sligo, Republic of Ireland, to my ancestral village in The North on my first trip to the island. It was a most generous Christmas gift Beth had given me, that trip. Planes, trains, buses, and hacks got us everywhere we wanted to be in Cork, Kerry, Dublin, Sligo, and Fermanagh counties to the wee village (wide spot in the laneway, really) whence my people came.

I was home againfor the first time.

Id always held firmly to our familys Irish heritage, even in the absence of proof beyond family lore. The red hair of my youth, skin so white it shaded toward blue, save when it turned lobster-red at the hint of sun, freckles so prevalent they were something of an embarrassment, and my ability to put on the brogue whenever a laugh was called for were all the confirmation I needed that We are Irish.

Not until a few months before Beth and I began planning that first trip had anyone in the family bothered to do any real research into our familys Irish history. Only after flipping page after page after page (after page) of an incredibly detailed yet painfully vague Gleason Family History, assembled by my Aunt Sandy, a Gleason by marriage to my fathers brother, did I find any reference to Ireland.

His name, this Irish Man with whom Id fostered a life-long, anonymous relationship, was Josias, Josias Gamble. He was born on Isla, Argyle Scotland SCOTLAND. He wasnt a Gleason and he wasnt even IRISH! Although, like many of The Plantation Times, he did marry Irish.

The Plantation Times were difficult for the Irish, as English overlords imported Scottish ruffians to act as foremen and overseers of their newly acquired land holdings, particularly in Ulster, which is now part of Northern Ireland. Josias Gamble was one such scoundrel the Brits recruited to come to the island to work and generally harass the Irish villagers near the city of Enniskillen. The great mistake in some casesat least in the case of great-gran-da Gamblewas that some of this imported muscle had little more regard for the English than did the Irish.

Josias married an Irish girl in county Fermanagh and had three sons. Some three hundred and thirty odd years later I was born, his ninth great grandson in Grand Rapids, Michigana mutt to be sure but a mutt of Irish descent.

I knew of the name part. In the days of the Great Depression, formal adoptions by stepfathers were a detail and expense overlooked by far more than just my great-grandfather. It was he to whom the county Tipperary name Gleason belonged: William Selah Gleason, born 1882. He married my great-grandmother, Marie (Andrews) Gamble and welcomed her son, my grandfather, Fred Darrel Gamble, into his home and later, his business. This was possibly the most affirming form of acceptance for that generation of Americans. When he enlisted in the Army during World War II, my grandfather laterof his own accordchanged his name to Darrell Fredrick Gleason, after his stepfather, along with his birth date.

Mine is the first generation in our family to have never met a Gamble. I was the oldest, and Darrell died two months and four days before I was born. That might be the reason I held tight to my Irishness when I was at school. Maybe it was a longing to connect to a family past, which to call murky would be to call the journey in which I engaged over the winter of 2005-2006 a vacation. Maybe Ill never know for sure why, but as I write this, Im pretty much leaning back toward crediting Mrs. Magee.

Trevis! the slight woman with a severe, frosted beehive, lording over her classroom in an orange checked smock-dress said of my wearing green-plaid Toughskins on that St. Patricks Day, if you aint