Elysium

By Pierce Kelley

After Michael McDuffy, a retired professor from Trinity College Dublin, now living in the village of Sneem in County Kerry, Ireland, begins showing

signs associated with Alzheimer's Disease, he is referred to mental health professionals for help. Brendan Sullivan, a young clinical psychology student from University College Cork, is assigne

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rushmore Press LLC
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955156295

Pierce Kelley

Pierce Kelley is a retired lawyer, educator, professional athlete and now he is a full-time author. He has written over two dozen books, most of which are novels, but some are non-fiction, such as a text book on Civil Litigation which was used in a few colleges and universities for many years. He has recently been inducted into the USTA-Florida Hall of Fame. He now lives in Vero Beach, Florida.

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Acknowledgments

In this book, I explore the human condition of aging through the eyes of a young man studying to become a clinical psychologist. I have chosen Ireland as the setting for the story, and I walked over a hundred miles across and around what is called the Ring of County Kerry to gather insight and details to help me better describe the Emerald Isle, though the story could be set in any country in the world. It is a universal topic.

I thank the many people from Ireland who I met along my walk for their kindness and welcoming nature. I heard it said that they consider themselves to be the 51st state. Ireland has sent tens of millions of its sons and daughters to the US over the last few centuries, most never to return.

Specifically, I acknowledge and thank the following people in no particular order: Leo, the taxi driver from Cahirseveen; Jim, Mary, and Monica from the Green House in Sneem; Michael from the Ferryman’s guesthouse in Portmagee; Pat and Mike, the two men from Portmagee who ferried me to Skellig Michael on two occasions; Maurice and Dean from Ireland walk/hike/bike; Cathy from the Stone Lodge in Cahirdaniel, and Flourinella from Kenmare. I also thank Kathleen Lamanna, an Irish woman from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, who added much to the final product. Most of all, though, I thank my two traveling companions, Patrick and Marlene Doherty, who made the arduous journey a much more enjoyable one.

I read a number of books to prepare myself for the task of writing this book, including the following: The World of the Druids, Miranda J. Greene, Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1997; The Celts, Frank Delaney, Little, Brown and Company, 1986; Loss of Self, Carl Eisdorfer and Donna Cohen, W.W. Norton, 2002; The Thirty-Six Hour Day, Nancy L. Mace, M.D., and Peter A. Rabin, M.D., The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985; The Immortal Irishman, Timothy Egan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2016); Irishisms, Ronan Moore, Gill books, 2017, and Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, John O’Dohohue, Harper Perennial, 1998.

Inscription

To everything, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

—Ecclesiastes 3:1 (King James Version)

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my parents, Robert Pierce Kelley and Marjorie Sullivan Kelley. His family hailed from County Clare and hers from County Kerry. Most members of both families came to America during the famine years of 1845 to 1853.

Chapter One

Birth to Early Adulthood

Brendan Sullivan here, and I’m about to tell you a story of an extraordinary man I met when I was beginning my career as a clinical psychologist and how he changed my life. I expect that everyone has someone in their life who has played an important role in determining who and what they became. For most, it’s a parent or relative. For me, more than any other non-family member, it was him.

First, allow me to tell you a little bit about myself. I was born on September 4, 1998, in the village of Sneem, County Kerry, in the Republic of Ireland. It is so named because the Sneem River noisily and turbulently flows right through the heart of what is a small village in the southwest corner of the island into Kenmare Bay, and then out into the Atlantic Ocean. Places where fresh waters of a river unite with the saltwater of an ocean or a sea are called estuaries, and that is one of the many unique qualities of my hometown.

It’s a village of barely five hundred people at the moment, and it isn’t likely to grow much bigger any time soon. In fact, it might even shrink some. The so-called Celtic Tiger of the 1990s never arrived in Sneem and the prospects for growth aren’t good. Most of the young people move away from Sneem, and all of Ireland for that matter, as soon as they can, never to return except for the occasional visit every now and again. Though they leave the country, the country never leaves them—that’s a forever kind of thing.

So far, I’ve only made it to Cork, barely a hundred kilometers away, but who knows what the future holds for me? I might stay forever right where I am. Why not? I love where I live, but that’s a story that is still unfolding and yet to be told.

Because it has changed so little over the years, it provides a glimpse into the Ireland of centuries ago. Problems such as pedophile priests and abusive nuns are found only in the newspapers and on the news . . . not in the homes of the inhabitants or their places of business, nor in their daily conversations, and definitely not in their hearts. It’s a magnificent place, full of beauty and wonder, nestled between picturesque hills and valleys which surround it on three sides with Kenmare Bay and the mighty Atlantic on the fourth.

We have no shortage of fairies, leprechauns, and spirits from the past in Sneem. Ancient beliefs and traditions remain firmly embedded in the hearts and minds of all who live there, as do past grievances against the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and of course, King Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher, and all of the rest. We hold firmly to a hope that the six counties in the north will, one day, join the Republic so that it will be, as the song goes, one nation once again. In that regard, it is a typical Irish town.

Tourism is now Sneem’s primary stock in trade as it is one of the major stops on the Ring of Kerry. Dozens of tour buses descend upon it every day from the first of April until the end of September every year to take in all of the charms that the village has to offer. Not much happens between October 1 and the end of March, however.

The winters are cold and windy though temperatures rarely dip below freezing. That anomaly is due to the fact that warm waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf Stream surround the island, which isn’t all that far from the arctic circle. Turf fires in the homes, restaurants, and bars, of which there are plenty, provide the primary source of warmth for all who live there.

As it is throughout all of Ireland, many shades of green dot the landscape due to frequent rainfall, but the buildings in the village provide a kaleidoscope of colors, too. Houses and places of business are painted with different colors. Bright yellows, reds, blues, and various shades of green, among others, adorn the buildings.

It’s a mystical place, rich in history and deeply steeped in the traditions and beliefs of the Catholic Church. The troubles of the past thousand years with their neighbors to the east are barely below the surface. They haven’t gone away and aren’t likely to go away anytime soon, but a fragile truce remains in place in Northern Ireland at the moment, which remains separate and apart from the Republic.

Nowadays, the issue of Brexit and Boris Johnson, and how it will affect the border between the two countries, is the talk of the town. The past continues to exert a powerful influence upon the present, however. That may never change.

There is little dissent in Sneem, though, or anywhere else in the Republic, for that matter. For the most part, all are fervent Catholics. Even in the northern six, Catholics are growing in numbers. We’re still outnumbered, but it’s by an increasingly smaller number—less than a percentage point or two. Maybe things will change when there are more of us than them.

My father, Patrick, was a teacher at St. Michael’s National School Sneem where he taught Mathematics and our native Irish language, Gaelic, to the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders for years. It has had about a hundred students in it rather consistently for decades, but that number is decreasing lately. He was a graduate of St. Michael’s as were his parents and all of his brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, and all the rest of his side of the family. Now, he is the headmaster there.

All students wore uniforms and were required to say prayers and attend Mass daily back then and they continue to do so to this day. Even though the country is in the process of separating the church from the state, those things haven’t changed yet. It remains a Catholic school where the students continue to observe religious practices on a daily basis despite the fact that it is a state-sponsored school. Implementation of the laws requiring the separation is still a work in progress.

My mother, whose name is Margaret, was a stay-at-home mom, and I was the youngest of seven children. My oldest brother, Rory, is eighteen years my elder. He’s old enough to be my father and has children who are about my age. Siobhan is sixteen years older than I am; Patrick is fourteen years older; Diedre twelve; Kevin ten, and Maura eight. I was an accident, as Rory and Kevin like to tell me from time to time.

She was different. Neither she nor any of her family was from Sneem as most people who live there are. We don’t get much new blood, and not all that many move away. Everyone knows everyone else and no one minds only their own business.

She met my father in Cork while he was attending University College there. She had completed her second level of education as required at age sixteen but had not gone on to the next level. She was a few years younger than he.

They were married before my father received his teacher’s degree and, as I later figured out, Rory was born many months before the wedding. That may have had something to do with why she didn’t go to the next level in school, but I never asked and she never said anything about it. Her family was from Cork.

But she was different in other ways, too, as I found out at a very young age. She wasn’t a Catholic! In a country where nearly ninety-eight percent of the people were Catholic at the time, it was rare to find anyone who wasn’t. That has changed now, as more and more things are coming out about so many of the priests being pedophiles and how the nuns abused young girls for decades at the Magdalene Laundries, also called asylums. Many have turned away from the church as a result. Despite that, the church is surviving the crisis and the Republic of Ireland remains overwhelmingly Catholic.

Irish Catholics have clung to their religion as a badge of honor for centuries. It’s a wonder, actually, how they, or we, I should say, did it, enduring so much. King Henry VIII broke from Rome in 1534 when, by his decree, the Act of Supremacy went into effect. It declared that he, the King of England, not the Pope in Rome, was the supreme leader of England in all matters, including religion. The Church of England was created soon thereafter, and that is when the troubles began.

Over a hundred years later in 1649, when Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland and dispossessed most Irish Catholics of their land, the problems intensified to an unspeakable degree. He invaded with an overpowering army and killed every man, woman, and child in two large cities that opposed him. He completely subdued the country shortly thereafter as no one dared to oppose him. Some historians have said that he killed nearly half of the people in Ireland in the process of solving what was called the Catholic problem.

Penal laws were put into effect whereby Catholics were prohibited from owning land in Ireland. We were, in effect, trespassers, unwelcome wherever we went. In doing so, millions of people were left homeless. They were left to wander the land, living in barrel-shaped wagons pulled by horses and came to be known as tinkers. Some continue to do so to this very day though they’re now living in RVs and their numbers have shrunk considerably.

There were small pockets of Ireland where the laws weren’t enforced, such as the poorest land in the country, located west of Shannon, in the province of Connaught. The expression to hell or Connaught, came into being, said to be uttered, quite proudly, by Cromwell himself. He didn’t bother to pursue Catholics in what was called the West. It was, and still is, boggy land, not good for much of anything, at least not as far as he was concerned.

The Penal Laws, as they were called, designed to punish those who refused to renounce Catholicism, prohibited Irish Catholics from practicing their religion, voting, holding public office, speaking their native language, or attending school, among many other things. Priests were hung if caught saying mass. Those laws remained in place for nearly two hundred years until Daniel O’Connell, the Great Liberator, began the movement which ended them.

To me, the most amazing and unbelievable part of that period of time in our history was that Irish Catholics could have avoided those hardships if they had agreed to convert to the Church of England and deny their Catholic beliefs. The main difference between the two religions was the issue of the infallibility of the Pope in Rome. Some Catholics did so in order to survive. It was called taking the soup. That meant that they received food, usually in the form of hot soup, if they renounced their faith.

Irish Catholics endured centuries of hardships to keep their faith. It would take more than some pedophile priests and cruel nuns to shake that faith. Many preferred to die rather than deny their beliefs.

None of that applied to my mother, however, to my knowledge, although some of her ancestors must have been Catholics too, but I’m not sure about that. Her mother wasn’t nor were any others of her family that I met. I never knew her father who died before I was born. She certainly had no love for the English, though. Druids, what few there were back then, were treated just as badly because they, too, refused to accept the teachings of the Church of England and went into hiding, or ceased to exist, for hundreds of years.

She attended Mass with my father and raised all of the children, including me, as Catholics, though. No one ever knew that she wasn’t a believer until later. None of my brothers and sisters ever knew until I unwittingly told them. I was a young child at the time.

I was the first in the family to find out, I believe, although I’m sure our father knew. He must have. How could he not have known? It was only after her secret came out, because of me, that most people found out about any of that.

In 1995, the country of Ireland voted to allow divorces. Five years later, in the year 2000, she filed suit to end her marriage with my father. She was one of the first to apply for one in Sneem and all of County Kerry from what I later learned. Before that, people in Ireland were married for life or until death do us part because that was not only church doctrine, it was also the law of the land.

It was quite a scandal for her to do what she did. Not being a Catholic and then filing for a divorce, she might as well have put a scarlet letter on all of her clothes or had it stamped on her forehead. For centuries, Druids were quite secretive about their beliefs. Now, they can practice their religion openly without fear of recourse.

As a result, my family was split up. Actually, it was only the two of us who were separated from the rest. All of the other children stayed with my father in Sneem. I went with my mother back to Cork to live with her mother.

She continued to take me to church, and I attended a Catholic school, but that was, as I later found out, because the final divorce decree required her to do that. I don’t know if she would have done that otherwise. Even now, we don’t talk about those things. She allowed me to make that decision for myself once I was old enough, and I chose to be a Catholic.

However, when I was still a youngster too young to choose for myself, I went with her on many, if not most, weekends to her places of worship, which weren’t in churches or buildings within a city, town, or village. Their ceremonies were all out in the woods surrounded by rocks and trees, for the most part, with few exceptions. She would dress me up in a white gown and drag me along with her wherever she went to meet with her Druidic brethren.

At the time, I was too young to protest, but I didn’t really mind it at all. At least, I have no recollections of anything bad that happened at their ceremonies—there were no animals being sacrificed, as had been the practice years before. As my mother explained it to me, the Druids worshiped all things of nature—the moon, the sun, the stars, the animals of the forest, rocks, plants, and trees—especially the oak trees. I have mostly favorable recollections of those days even though I was too young to understand what it was all about.

Things changed when I was six or seven after I made the mistake of telling some of my friends in school where I had been one weekend. They all started to make fun of me and called me names. The priests at my school were really upset with my mother once they found out about it.

After that, I began to spend most of my weekends with my father in Sneem. I don’t remember going with her anymore to Druidic events once that happened, though. I still lived with her, but I attended the Saint Luke’s National School in Cork from the first to the sixth grades, and not with him, at his school, as he wanted. There, I received a Catholic education and that satisfied him, apparently.

My parents argued about where I should go to secondary school. My mother wanted me to go to a public school that wasn’t run by the Catholic Church. He, of course, wanted me to go to one that was. She wanted me to go to a school with both girls and boys. He preferred an all-boys school.

I wasn’t opposed to attending a school run by the priests, but I wanted one where there were both boys and girls, not just boys. Ultimately, I was sent to the Christian Brothers Secondary School, which was for boys only. I think they might have gone back to the divorce court to resolve that issue, but I never knew that for sure.

Secondary School was a bit of a blur. I was still spending most of my weekends in Sneem with my father, so that prevented me from doing things with my friends in Cork. Most of all, though, it prevented me from playing Gaelic football or hurling. Those were the two things I loved to do the most. The games were always on Saturdays and I was almost always away.

My father was a big fan of the Kerry Kings, the best team in all of Ireland, winning more All-Ireland Championships than any other county in the country, including the north at the time. When I became a fan of the Cork City team, he was sorely disappointed in me. More than anything else I ever did with my father, going to the games between those two teams with him was the best, even though we argued vigorously over which team was better. Kerry was my second favorite team.

Hurling was another matter entirely. If he could have, he would have prevented me from ever picking up a caman. If he found one of my sliotars lying around, he’d throw it away. My older brother, Rory, had been hit in the head by one during a game and sent to the hospital when he was in school. My father didn’t think he was ever the same after, but I loved playing it as a boy despite that.

The Gaelic Athletic Association or GAA sponsored both football and hurling, among other sports, but it steadfastly refused to support any sports that weren’t considered to be Irish, like soccer, rugby, or tennis. They still do. What’s most interesting about that is that the six counties in the north are a part of the GAA, but only Catholics are allowed to participate, even now.

So, I played football and, when my father wasn’t around, hurling. He was quite insistent about that. He absolutely forbade it.

For years, playing soccer was strictly forbidden, too, and I never played it as a child. Things have changed, and all of his grandkids now play soccer, but I never had much interest in it anyway, though it’s now quite big in Ireland, what with the World Cup and all. People play rugby, tennis, and other sports nowadays, but they’re not sanctioned by the GAA.

One of my biggest thrills, ever, was going to Fitzgerald Park in Killarney with my father to watch Kerry play Cork in an All-Munster final, even though it wasn’t much of a game. That was in 2007 when I was eight-years-old. Cork was trounced. I was hoping that they’d be able to keep it close, but they couldn’t. The stadium was packed with nearly forty thousand screaming Irishmen. It was mad. To this day, I’ve never seen anything like it.

My mother had no interest in sports whatsoever, though she loved to watch me run and play. I don’t think she cared if I won or lost; she just loved being with me and seeing me happy. She had no interest in the Cork City team and thought that hurling was simply disorganized crime.

As much as I enjoyed playing the games, it was unfortunate that I wasn’t better at them. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t too good, either. I was good enough to make the teams at my school, and that is when I got to play. When my school days ended, that pretty much ended my athletic career, such as it was. I was still a fan, though, and I still am.

After graduation from the Christian Brothers Secondary School, I chose to continue my education at University College Cork. Since I wasn’t born into a wealthy family, I chose it because I could stay at home and not have to pay for housing. Tuition was free for me, as it is for everyone else who is an Irish citizen. I chose psychology as my intended major.

My father wasn’t happy with my career choice, and he made his displeasure clearly known. He wanted me to be a teacher like he was, and come back to work with him and live in Sneem. Two of my sisters had done so, and I was his last chance for that as far as any of his sons were concerned.

I guess I had an independent spirit, and I was determined to prove to him that I could do better, though there is nothing wrong with being a teacher. In fact, as I look back on things, I think I turned to psychology, not teaching, because of my father and mother divorcing and all of that. It confused me and put my life in turmoil for years . . . it still bothers me. I think it made me want to try to understand it all better and help people get through those kinds of things, especially the kids—kids like me.

Becoming a psychologist wasn’t easy, though, as I soon found out. To get accepted into a graduate program, I had to do very well in school. Again, I was pretty good, but not great. I was, by no means, at the top of the class.

In May of 2019, at the age of twenty, soon to be twenty-one, I received a degree called a Higher Diploma in Psychology, which I obtained with honors. That made me eligible for acceptance into a post-graduate program and for admission to the Registered Membership with the Psychological Society of Ireland. One had to be a member of it before being allowed to become a psychologist in Ireland.

Shortly after graduation, I decided to accept a job at the St. Stephen’s Psychiatric Hospital, located in Cork. It wasn’t my first choice, but it was the best of what few choices I had. My pay was to be 25,000 euros per year, which seemed like a small fortune to me.

I was to be under the supervision of licensed clinical psychologists and I was on a career track to become one myself after three years at the hospital, which included some further classwork as well. I would be doing a wide variety of things, including some work with children, though not as much as I wanted. I was delighted. That is where my life as an independent, self-supporting man would begin, and that is where my story begins.

Chapter Two

St. Stephen’s Psychiatric Hospital

St. Stephen’s is one of the few teaching hospitals in all of Ireland. As such, it has some of the best professors, many of whom are at the forefront of research on various issues in the country. It is a vibrant place full of bright people of all ages. It is also the largest place, by far, which provides care and treatment for those with mental health problems in the southwest part of Ireland. It was a good place for me to begin. I was fortunate to get a job there.

The first month or so went by quickly. Between finding myself a place to live, starting the new job, and learning all of the names of the people I would be working with, I was absolutely for the birds—pure cracked. For the most part, I was just being asked to tag along and observe how things were supposed to be done. Colin O’Riordan was my immediate supervisor and, most of the time, I followed him around.

He was in his third year at St. Stephen’s, well on his way to finishing up. He could hardly wait for it to end and he didn’t seem to mind letting people know how he felt. Once he completed his three years of clinical education, he was ready to move on to the next stage of his career and begin making much more money in the private sector.

According to him, that meant making at least twice as much, if not more, than he was making at St. Stephen’s. He never said exactly how much that would be, but it sounded pretty grand to me. I couldn’t imagine it. I was happy to be making what I was.

He quickly became more than just my mentor. He also became a friend. There were no airs about him. He didn’t take himself too seriously. He was still a student, learning, as we all were, and he understood that. He didn’t act as if he knew it all and we knew nothing, though he did say as much on more than a few occasions. He was a large man, about my height, but much more girth. He had a great belly laugh and most everyone seemed to like him. He made people laugh.

At first, he used to call me a spanner because I was always doing something stupid, like forgetting to lock a door after leaving a restricted area or putting down my phone and not knowing where I left it, things like that. He didn’t mean it in an unkind way; he was just having fun with me.

Up until that point in my life, I’d never had much of social life, being passed around like I was as a youngster, and then working as hard as I did to receive my degree, with honors, no less. Living at home with my mother and grandmother didn’t help much with that, either. So, when I joined him for a pint at a local pub, he was quickly able to see that I was a real rube. He called me full shilling.

Now that term, actually, is a very complimentary one. It means that the person is top-shelf, brilliant, capable, competent, and an all-around fine person. That isn’t the way he meant it with me, though, and everyone knew it.

It was true . . . and it always made people laugh when he called me that. Some of his friends called me a muppet for a while because I rarely had anything to say in response to defend myself. Mostly, I just sat there, smiling, listening to what everyone else had to say, enduring the abuse.

I didn’t defend myself or fight back. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. I was just glad to be there, part of the gang, so to speak.

Besides, most of his friends were like him, older than me and with much more experience than I had. I listened intently when they talked, even though they were, at times, insulting me. It was all in good fun or at least that’s how I took it. I was a newbie, and I knew it. I accepted that as a fact.

The other thing he did, besides guide me on how to become a good clinical psychologist, was introduce me to girls. I was beyond shy. I was backward.

My living arrangements, and going back and forth from my mother’s place to my father’s place as I did, made it difficult for me in that regard, too. I never had any real girlfriends. Going to an all-boys school, as I did, didn’t help. I was retarded in that regard.

Going out after work to a pub and drinking pints of Guinness with the people I was now working with was, by far, my favorite activity. There was no close second. I looked forward to those occasions, but they didn’t happen every day.

Technically, I was still a student working toward another degree. I still had classes to attend, at night, and much studying to do. I had to do well in those classes, too. Three nights a week I was in a classroom. Colin had a few more classes to finish, but he was actually teaching some classes to lower-level students like me when the professors weren’t available.

Besides, he had a girlfriend and had an active social life. I was only able to join him and his friends a couple of times a week whenever he invited me. I never went there by myself. I was too shy for that. Between work and the pub, I was interacting with girls more than I ever had in my life, and I was enjoying that. It was, as I said, a totally new experience for me.

There were about fifty other people who were in the same situation I was in, although not all were studying to become clinical psychologists. We were all graduates who were just beginning to work at St. Stephen’s in one department or another. I knew only a few of them because most had come from different schools across Ireland, not just Cork City.

Most were men, but maybe a third were women, which was a novelty for me. I hadn’t gone to school with girls since primary school. It was different in a good but distracting way.

There was this one tall, red-haired girl named Saoirse, who had started the same time I did, who caught my attention. She came from Trinity College, Dublin, and was very pretty. I was immediately attracted to her and I had to try hard not to stare whenever I saw her. She, too, was studying to be a clinical psychologist.

After a few weeks of awkwardly eyeing her, I finally found an opportunity to talk to her one day in the lunchroom where most of the employees ate. We talked about how the job was going and how difficult it was to work full-time and still go to school. We both had a statistics class, but not together, and she was having difficulties with it, as I was.

Other than talking to Colin, and a few others at work and the bar, I pretty much kept to myself. I didn’t have time for much of anything else. I was pleased when I broke the ice with her and could exchange greetings when we passed each other in the hallways.

I had found a nice, little, one-bedroom apartment not far from the hospital. It was more like a cottage, actually, which sat above a garage where a family by the name of Geagan parked their cars. Their house was about twenty meters away and I had a bit of privacy. It wasn’t too expensive and I could walk to work in ten minutes. It was perfect.

Gradually, I began to fit in. It took me a long time to learn everyone’s names and what their job responsibilities were, let alone figure out exactly what was expected of me. It was a good six weeks before I was allowed to do interviews and prepare reports on my own that the medical doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists would see. My work would be closely scrutinized by Colin and others, but it was my work and I felt much better about things when I reached that stage.

For the most part, I was required to fill out forms. The questions were there for me to ask, so that wasn’t the hard part. Talking to a person who was in some sort of crisis and usually not completely coherent wasn’t easy. I had to be objective and sort through what was fact and what was fiction. I had to think like a psychologist, not the twenty-one-year-old student that I was.

We were all required to take a course called Research and Writing to help us fill out the forms properly. The hospital was in the process of going to a fully operational computer system where manually filling out the forms would no longer be permitted. It wasn’t quite there yet, so writing legibly was critical, but what one had to say was obviously most important. Being concise and putting down only the most relevant things was demanded.

When I initially applied for the job, I was told that I would need a car as there would be times when I would be required to do some traveling. I didn’t have one when I was hired, but I was allowed a thirty-day period to obtain one after I started. So, after I received my first paycheck, I bought a used Skoda Octavia. The Geagans allowed me to park it next to their garage, not inside it.

The Skoda is made in Czechoslovakia and is quite common in Ireland. They’re much less expensive than most other vehicles, even the American or Japanese-made models. It has a fuel tank that holds about fifty liters and can run for about a thousand kilometers before a fill-up. It wasn’t long before I put it to use.

I didn’t mind the traveling part at all. It gave me an opportunity to get out of the hospital and be on my own for a while. Part of our responsibilities included going to