The Next Chapter | A Letter of Gratitude

Often times we wait to honor someone with our words when they're not around instead of telling them what they mean to us when they are right in front of us. This past weekend was an emotional time for my family- much like the past few months have been. My parents are in the process of making a life change by closing a very large chapter of their lives at then end of this year as my dad transistions into semi-retirement by selling the family busniess. It a transistion that needs to happen and it's well-deserved. This past Saturday evening was the annunal company christmas party, it was the last one for us as a family and my parents were honored by us all, so I took my pen to paper (fingers to a keyboard) and wrote a speech- but I was feeling too emotional (read: nervous) to share the entire thing and only verbally choked out a piece of what I had written down with the room. My mom did a pretty great job summing up my feelings when she stood up to talk but here it is in black and white. My letter of gratitude for two and a half decades of a job well done.

"I’m going to take it back to the beginning for a moment- not because this is the end of something, it’s not, it’s the beginning of something else. But it is the end of an era for one family busniess at was two generations strong. All of my earliest memories include this company, I grew up sitting on my dad's lap while he was on the phone, hiding under desks, playing with roladexes, keeping occupied with Nancy Drew computer games in a back office, pretending to answer the phones and make appointments and then actually growing up to answer phones and make appointments. But, back before it was K&K Dispatch and Dutchland it was ERX, a father and daughter team, and before it was ERX it was just one man sitting next to a payphone in a booth at Risser’s diner dispatching a couple trucks. His name was Harold. Harold had a dream and when a charasmatic man from the south walked into his life that dream became a reality. Unfortunately, it was a reality that he only got to live out for four months but thanks to a promise that a young truck driver made to a dying man at his bedside the dream lived on. That young driver put aside his own plans and dreams for the future, sat down behind the desk, picked up a phone and never looked back. For the past 25 years he’s been consistently putting the job first, giving up his Friday nights and his weekends, putting family second, and never expecting someone else to pick up the slack, which is something we know not all people are willing to do. Together with my mom and the Stegall’s he’s taken a seven truck-four door operation and build it into what it is today. I’ve had a front row seat watching this all unfold, I’ve been there through the ups and the downs, the struggles, the tears, the joy, the arguments that I wasn’t supposed to hear and the beautiful life that we are allowed to live because of it all. I even met my husband though the busniess. My parents, especially my dad has never wavered and he’s never given up— the man hardly ever complains and he’s just kept on keeping on for all these years willing to live out somebody else’s dream. So, as this chapter closes and another one opens hopefully it will bring a slower pace of life, more time to enjoy loved ones, sleep better, feel lighter and relax a bit. I hope you both truly understand how your hard work has impacted us all and I hope you know how thankful I am for everything that you have done at work and at home. The values and the lessons will be ones that I keep with me forever.  With love, always."