Mr. Holland

Mr. Holland’s Dream

When Mr. Holland was a young man, he played a lot of football, and he had always been thin and very strong. But then he worked in an office for many years, and he drove to work in a car, so when he was forty, he was fat and very soft, and he didn’t wish to get fatter and softer every year.

            One day one of his friend said to him: “Would you like to be thinner, Fred?”

            “Of course, I would”, Mr. Holland answered.

            “Well, his friend said, “stop going to your office by car, and get a bicycle”.

Mr. Holland had not ridden a bicycle for many years. “It’s very hard to learn to ride a bicycle again at your age,” his wife said.

But it was not too hard for Mr. Holland to do. He usually sat in his living room and read the newspapers in the evening, but he bought a bicycle for his birthday and practiced riding it every evening instead. He hoped that it would help him to get thinner, and he got a lot of pleasure from it.

            He found little roads which were not really very narrow, but were too narrow for cars, and there he got away from the nasty noises of the city, which were becoming too much for him. They were not really very loud, but they were too loud for Mr. Holland.
           Then he began to go to his office by bicycle. Sometimes all the cars stopped at a red light, and he went past them to the front, because his bicycle was narrow. Then he was very happy.

            Yesterday he stopped at a red light, and a man came up behind him on another bicycle. He stopped too and said to Mr. Holland, “Have the police taken your driving licence away too.”

            Mr Holland was not fat when he was young. Then he became fat and soft because he sat too much. He wanted to get thinner, and a friend told him not to use his car, but to go by bicycle instead. Mr Holland's wife thought that it was too hard, but it was not. Mr Holland began to ride to his office with his bicycle, but another man thought that he did this because the police had taken his driving licence away.