I wake up at 3 am to heavy steel toe boots stomping through the house.

It happens every morning - sometimes later, sometimes earlier. It changes every day; one thing I know is that it will happen every morning. Then about 20 minutes later I will hear his truck roar to life, then slowly back out of the driveway. Before the rest of the town wakes up, he will already be heading to work, and he won’t get back until after everyone else has been home for about an hour. He will talks to me and my mom a little bit, eat supper, and go to bed, only to repeat it all.

Over half his life has been spent driving a semi. He is good at it, it is what he knows. Sometimes a little 7 year old girl would run up to him so excited on the days that she was off school saying, “Daddy, I don’t have school tomorrow! Does that mean I get to go to work with you?” He would smile down at me and tell me I do get to go to work with him.

There is just something about riding up inside the cab of a semi when you are seven years old. You feel as though you are above the whole world up there. Watching my dad shift that ten gear with ease while talking to me and focusing on the road is just something I did not understand. I would sit in awe of this man, my father, bouncing up and down in his air ride seat.

He did this job everyday for most of my life; in fact, he still does. He does it because he is good at it, he does it to provide for my mom and me, he does it for people he will probably never meet. He has had to miss some of my grade school basketball games because he was behind the wheel of a truck.

He delivers so many things in that one semi, things like ammunition, chocolate bars, laundry soap, butter. You may not think about it, but I do. All those things get to the store for you to buy because of people like my dad. My dad wakes up at 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning so that he can get his load to the dock when it is scheduled. My dad travels many miles a day to provide food to Schnucks then go all the way to the edge of Illinois, almost Indiana, in one day.

You may take some of the things you have for granted but I don’t. I come from a family of truck drivers. You may want to try to speed pass that semi because he’s going 60 in a 65 and you want to go 75. What you don’t know is that his semi might max out at 65, like most do. Some of those drivers are missing important parts of their lives for you, someone they will never meet.

So before you speed off all aggravated at them, think about a 7 year old girl looking up at her dad as he hops in his semi to go in for the night shift and won’t get to see his little girl again until 2 days later because their sleep schedules won’t be the same until then.

The life of a truck driver’s daughter is great, but also sad. Being away at school, being 280 miles away from my dad for most of the year makes me look at trucks different. Almost every time I see a semi, my eyes start to water a little because I think of the man that means the most to me in the world.

You may look at semi trucks as a pain when you get stuck behind one, but I look at them sad because I miss my dad.