One Day With My Dad

I spent a day with my father at work. He drives a semi and is the hardest working person I have ever meet. Here are some pictures and words about it.....

........................................................................................

4:30 AM. That's when my fathers work day starts. When you wake up that early it feels like a you are playing a joke on your body. Your not even really that tired cause your body is thinking that being up is only going to be a temporary thing. The sun has not ever begun thinking about coming up yet. Coffee, packed lunch, kiss the wife goodbye, keys, headlights illuminated his truck in a dark lot in back of the shop. He has done this a lot. Started when he was 20 and now he is 60. We climbs in the cab and gets it started. The odometer reads 700,000+ miles. He has owned several trucks in his life and all of them have been used this much. The drive starts. We watch the sun rise behind us as we travel west across mid Michigan. We barrel across MI twice before noon. You can get a lot done when your day starts at 4:30.

...

He hauls bark. Specifically play scape. They put this stuff under playground equipment, so when little kids fall on their heads off the monkey bars they are less likely to die. He probably supplies all of south east MI with this stuff.

Now I don't know anything about working like this. The closest thing I have ever had to a full time job is landscaping one summer for a short spell. My dad has been at the furnace full blast for most of his life. Day in and day out Same Thing Daily. Lunch time for my father is around 12 noon like normal people, but he has already been working for 8 hours. So we take a few loads and end up driving across MI several times in one day taking play scape to the yard.

This play scape stuff is light and steams when you load it into the truck cause in the pill it is decomposing and when you break it up it release some kind of gas. It smells a little, but my dad does not care. He just loads up the truck for the next load. We end our day at 5 or so. "A short and easy Friday," my dad says on the drive home at the end of the day.

...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------