Raisins

My admiration for my dad began long before he ever worked on Voyager 2, finished his Ph.D, or worked with Sir Godfrey Hounsfield (the inventor of the CAT scanner). I started to admire my dad before I could even talk, when he would lay me down and feed me a slow, steady stream of raisins until I just about fell asleep. Before respect, before admiration, love was manifest in the feeding of raisins to an infant.

Raisins

From the feeding of raisins came a baby girl's admiration for her raisin-feeding dad. In short time, he stopped dispensing raisins, but my admiration continued to increase as my dad never let me down. Despite career advancement and impressive intellectual accomplishments, Dad's quiet, enduring, self-sacrificing love was faithfully devoted to his family. In his little girl's eyes, there was little more admirable than that and I determined to be just like Dad when I grew up.

Striving to be just like Dad, I began by fashioning my education so I could follow his career path. I was happily on my way when catastrophe befell me in the form of neurological injury. My medical situation was quite severe, threatening my life, stripping me of many abilities and requiring months of hospitalization and therapies during my senior year of high school. This grueling struggle earned me the admiration of many people I did not even know. But through it all, the unfailing support of my parents was my rock.

Pure, unadulterated love carried me through my medical crises, I graduated high school and entered college. There I began to adjust my educational goals to reflect my changed physical and intellectual abilities.

Sometime during college, my dad suffered the rupture of one of the disks in his back. Searing pain and the inability to stand or walk drove Dad into the hospital where I had endured operations and months of therapies. There, my own trusted neuro-surgeon reduced the dad I so admired to a patient on an operating table, after which Dad was grounded to a hospital bed for two full weeks.

Raisins

No longer did I strive to pursue my dad's world. In an unlikely twist of events, he had entered mine. Still unable to drive at the time but remembering the loneliness of my own hospital stays, I rode the city bus to visit Dad. Aside from respect, aside from admiration, love was manifest in my daily visits between classes. Without realizing what I was doing, I was metaphorically feeding my dad raisins.

Then one day near the end of his hospitalization, Dad surprised me by saying something that truly touched my heart. He said that he never realized how hard it was to be sick in the hospital and that he really respected me for what I had overcome.
 
From the metaphorical feeding of raisins came an injured man's admiration for his raisin-feeding daughter.