Legendary Short Stories: Vermont Dairy, Inc. - Lessons learned about life and beyond...

Vermont Dairy Inc. - Lessons learned about life and beyond...

Today, one of my home hospital nurses was here checking on me and changing my foot bandages. I got these injuries to my feet as a result of being kicked out of the home I shared with my mother. She was convinced that I was a bad man and that she was afraid of me. Well, I am not a bad man and I am nobody to be feared. If you knew me personally you would know this for youself. As my mother has dementia, she tends to gain a mindset whereby she believes things that are not true. As a strong-willed person, once her mind is set on something, there is no changing her mind on things and thus, when she directed the Sheriff Deputy to remove me from her home, and it is her home, I became homeless for the first time in my life.

As a result of some first responders who were treating me during this time, they foolishly took my ahtletic shoes away from me and I walked pretty much bare feet in the extreme heat in the desert where I live for two days badly damaging my feet to the point where one of them nearly had to be removed. After one week in the hospital being treated with anti-biotics and pain medicine, I was released and allowed to go home where for the next two months, I will be treated by nurses and physical therapists to allow me to heal from my extensive foot wounds.

I would like to thank my local fire deptment paramedics for the wonderful opportunity of enduring the excessive amount of pain that I am dealing with, walking with a walker at the age of 55 for the first time in my life, and probably enjoying the privilege of enjoying damaged feet and all that entails for the rest of my life. I don't really want to thank these irresponisble paramedics, I am just being silly.

My nurse's name is Alvin and he has been a nurse for 10 years. Previous to that he was a farmer in the Philippines. He told me that is unhappy being a nurse and told me that he wants to go back to the Philippines and get another farm to follow his life's dream. He is 35 now.

I distinctly remember when I was 35 years old like Alvin. I suffered from clinical depression, I had a job that I disliked greatly, I didn't appreciate the finer things in my life, my wife (now my ex-wife, we divorced in July 2012 and I am single now), my job (as I just said), my car, my home, but I appreciated my children. Basically, I didn't appreciate anything in my life. It wasn't always that way though. There was a time when I worked for my father and it was literally the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

I began working for my father's business, a meager and humble drive through convenience store called Vermont Dairy which is located at the corners of Vermont and 228nd at 22416 S. Vermont Avenue in Torrance, California. Vermont Dairy is still there today. I was 14 when I began working there. My father asked me before I began working for me if I wanted a car when I turned 16.

Naturally, I said yes believing naively that he would buy one for me. My father promptly told me that I would work for him at the dairy and save my money for a car. Initially, I was disappointed to learn this fact but soon I learned the value of hard work and the value of money and of having a goal of saving it to purchase something in the future and so I happily showed up for work and worked hard from the beginning of my shift until the end of the work day.

Fast forward two years: On September of 1980 I turned 16 and my father took me to the local DMV office where I passed my driver's license with flying colors and was issued my temporary Driver's License. Hooray! My father then took me to a car dealership that he believed to be reputable to look at a couple of cars. When I saw this grey colored 1977 Ford Mustang, I knew that I had found the one!

We inquired as to the price and found out that it was being listed at exactly $6,000.00. I had saved $3,000.00 and my father agreed to spot me the remaining amount so that I could purchase the car in my name provided that I pay for gasoline and oil changes. He was a generous man and told me that he would take care of the rest of the expenses for the car. And so I found myself the proud owner of a gently used, 1997 Ford Mustang which was in pristine condition outside and inside.

For the next 12 years I continued working for my father. I learned much from him, lessons about life and business that I remember to this day. The strongest lessons I learned in my time working at Vermont Dairy was on how to treat people with basic dignity and honor. These lessons and shaped me to the core. While I have many fond memories about working at my dad's business and of working with my dad, the most chief lesson that I learned there, which I only just learned today, was that life is more than a job, job security, money, prestige of position, social status, possessions, or the like. Life, as the saying goes, is what we make of it.

Boom! I just said it and I will say it again for emphasis: Life is what we make of it.

Yes, life is what we make of it. If we choose to make a bad life for ourselves, and I did just that in my 30's and early 40's, we will, in fact have a bad life. If we choose to make a bad life for ourselves, as I did from my mid-forties until today, we will have a good life even if our lives take an occasional, yet brief, turn for the worse. As a side note, those occasional down turns are ALWAYS brief although they feel like they are going on forever when they happen.

Back to my nurse Alvin: As I just mentioned, Alvin told me while he was dressing my wounds that he wasn't happy being a nurse and that we wanted to become a farmer as he was in his youth. That was his life's dream I began to think about what my life's dream was when I was his age and to be honest with you, I had no life's dream. I had no dreams at all for the entire span of years from the age of 30 through 45. It wasn't until I reached the age of 45 that I began to dream dreams that would be inspire and propel me into the future.

I wish that I had such clarity about what I wanted to do with my life. At age 38, my life would be determined by my diagnosis of bipolar disorder which limited me as to what I could do. Eventually, I became a special education English teacher and was a fine one at that. Also eventually, my Lithium stopped working (I had faithfully taken Lithium since 1998) and I was forced to resign, yes I said forced, by my school district. I miss teaching and will never teach again because of the actions I took when I was a teacher. My teaching credential was permanently revoked because of these actions and that is that as they say. Now I am a writer and a damn good one at that.

I hope to make a living writer and I am convinced that i will one day. Still, I wish that when I was 35 I had the same conviction as Alvin has now. Moreover, living the life of a farmer has a certain appeal to me. As I indicated earlier, I worked for a man my father, who owed a dairy farm wth his brother. They had owned this particular dairy farm since the mid-50s. I worked as a cashier, and later a weekend manager, for my father in his store from the age of 14 to 28.

I learned many life long lessons about what it is to be an excellent employee, how to manage a business which will come in handy when I purchase my friend's tattoo shop which is located in Palm Desert, California close to where I live, and what it means to be a decent, upstanding citizen who helps his fellow citizens, particularly when they are in need.

I guess that's why I have a heart for the homeless and desire to see that they are taken care of. Having been homeless myself, I feel an even stronger desire to help those in need just like my father before me, who distinctly remembers the sound of the leather boots of the Nazis marching through his neighborhood on the fateful day that they took over The Netherlands for Der Fuhrer (and let me tell you, EVERY day of his life he was thankful that he liven in what he considered to be the greatest nation ever. Tragically, he died in 2012 leaving behind his wife and two children, me and my brother, but he provided well for us and thanks to his hard work, I have a safe and comfortable place to live), did every single day of his life.

Looking back at my life, even though I live with constant and dreadful pain EVERY day, I am thankful for my provisions and that all of my needs are taken care of even when times like now when I have exactly no dollars and no sense to my name. But things always have a way of working out for me. They always have and they always will. This much I am confident of. Now I am 55 years old and I will be getting older still with each passing year. I will be fine in my old age though due in part to my experience working for Vermont Dairy Farms, Inc, and for the greatest and most intelligent man I know, even though he only had a high school education, Mr. Simon Van Beek. Rest in Peace dad...

And remembre this always: Life is what we make of it.

Vermont Dairy, Inc. which is still there today at the corners of Vermont and 223rd, is located at 22416 S. Vermont Ave, Torrance, CA.