Dreams from My Father

My father was born with bronchial asthma.  This is a "disease caused by increased responsiveness of the tracheobronchial tree to various stimuli."  In short, he was born with asthma.  He had to be taken out of school constantly because of his lungs.  He stayed home and took care of his animals; chickens, ducks, guinea pigs, fish, dogs and cats and helped his mother with the household chores as a kid.  He knew how to hand sew, and sew with a machine, how to scale a fish and how to cook.  However, in high school, he was the popular guy, the jock.  He played football, basketball, surfed every morning, and was in a club where you have parties every weekend.  He longed to go to Idaho for college and become a veterinarian because his childhood was filled with animals.  He went to the first semester in college, which stressed him to the limit.  He began to have chronic headaches and stomach aches often.  He slept all day and with black curtains because the sun hurt his eyes.  He'd stopped surfing and wasn't on any college teams, and college was getting to him.  His mom made him go to the doctor and the doctor told him he had gastric ulcers which is when the acid in your stomach eats away the lining and you have really bad stomach aches.  His doctor ordered him out of college and said just to surf and relax so that the ulcers would heal.  He was never able to graduate from college for any degree and began working as a bag boy for the local supermarket.  When he was promoted to the highest pay for a cashier, he earned more than his mother, and decided to give her every other pay check.  He quit working at the market and began to work for a bread company called Oroweat.  A few years after he'd been working there, their company was going out of business because the bosses were taking the money and using it for themselves.  He quit that job got a new job at Pint Size Corporation.  This company distributed ice cream such as Häagen-Dazs and Dreyers.  The people there didn't do their job and the bosses didn't want to fire them because they were all friends.  He quit that job and went to work for his friend at a recycling plant in Hawaii.  He spent about a month there and decided that he liked working with food.  He took a job at Meadow Gold Dairies and worked there for a short while, and quit because he got a better job at Hawaii Food Alliance, or HFA where he currently works about from 2 am to about 6 at night 5 days a week which is around 80 hours.

He wants me to go to college so that I don't have to work long hours like he does.  He has let me have rabbits, guinea pigs, ducks, dogs and a million fish, and I have learned to love all of them and I want to complete my father's dream of being a veterinarian.