The first line said, “If you’re reading this in your truck, I guess I know you pretty well.”
I honestly looked around the cab when I read it. It wasn’t from the company president or some executive I’d never met. It was a letter signed by twenty-three people I’d worked beside over the years. Guys I’d loaded trucks with at three in the morning. Women who’d covered my shift when my wife was sick. People who’d retired, transferred, or moved away years ago.
One by one, they’d written short notes. Some were funny. Some weren’t. One guy reminded me of the snowstorm in ’98 when we slept on cots at the plant because the roads were closed. Another thanked me for teaching him how to drive a forklift without making him feel stupid. A woman I’d trained fifteen years earlier wrote, “You were the first person here who learned my kids’ names.” I sat there reading every page while traffic moved in and out of those loading docks I’d stared at for three decades.
Tucked behind the letters was something else. The employees had taken up a collection and put together enough money for a fishing boat. Not a fancy one, but exactly the kind I’d always stopped to look at and then talked myself out of buying. What got me wasn’t the boat. It was realizing these people had apparently been planning it for months without me knowing. The managers gave the speech. The people on the floor gave the gift.
A week later, I took that little boat out on a lake just after sunrise. The motor hummed, the water was flat as glass, and for the first time in thirty-one years I wasn’t checking a clock or thinking about a shift change. The envelope sat folded in my tackle box, and every now and then I’d pull out one of those notes and read it again while the morning fog drifted across the water.