Part 74: Climbing To The Top!

Well I was on vacation this week and it felt great to get the rest that I felt that I so needed. This is a big day in Louisville because we are hosting The Breeders Cup today at Churchill Downs and this years event will be bigger that ever. Just as there is a big event happening here, I too felt that this next part of Climbing To The Top, was an event in my sales career. Please enjoy this next part.

I moved along finding my way to accounts that I had never been to. Most of the stores now were mom and pop’s as well as convenience stores. Now at this point I just wanted to end this trip. I wanted to head back and lick the wounds of backing out of sales. I couldn’t help but wonder that if I had been the one to open the branch at the beginning, if I could have done any better. I imagined that I would have been great and this branch would have been one of the best in the country.  The reality of it all is that I may have done better but, I think that it still would have been a big challenge. The product that we were selling was not known in this part of the United States. Getting customers of our customers to buy is the biggest problem. Most people stick to their regional brands.

     I had finished the last store and now it was dark. Dark and cold and windy. As I made my way back I still was on back roads and had about forty miles to make it to the interstate. I couldn’t wait. There was a full moon and it provided the only light. The moon shown so brightly that it’s reflection bounced off the ice covered snow on the fields that seemed to go on for ever. 

     I made it back late into the evening. I was still buzzing from being on the road, so I decided to make some notes for a report that I would send the next day to the region manager. With the television on in the back ground I had a rumble in my stomach that made me realize that I had not eaton since early afternoon. When I awoke I was still at the table with paperwork scattered about. I headed to the bathroom to get cleaned up, all the while hunger pains growling. I made a big breakfast and started my day. It was five a.m. and back into the cold as I headed to the office. 

     I sent my report off to the region office and had meeting with each one of the route salesmen. I told them that we were going to be looking to move the branch to the east closer to the Mississippi river, maybe further. I wanted them to think about the move and whether they wanted to continue being salesmen with our company. Some had instant answers and I knew that they were going to quit soon as they found something else. I was relieved that three were going to remain, two of the three lived closer to where we might relocate the branch. I was sure that the third would leave soon after.

     My new task would be to find a location that made since, to make the branch more centralized for our new territory. This part of the job would be a big task, but would be less stress than what I had just done in backing out of over thirty customers. I would certainly need to pick up more business to cover our losses. I had a plan, and that plan was going to be that I would build close relationships with the customers that we had left and grow the business with them.

Changing Colors a Short Story, by Rick Heinkel

I know this is unusual to be sending out a blog this early and not be related to my other book, Climbing To The Top!, I will be sending a series of short stories from time to time. I hope you will enjoy these as well. If you recall in Climbing To The Top, my relationship with my father was rather tumultuous. I always viewed him as a very strong man.  Please enjoy this next short story.

                                                            

                                                               Changing Colors

     It was a crisp fall afternoon and my wife and I were returning home from an overnight trip visiting family back in our home town. We hadn’t been home in over a year, it was one of those trips as became know as a duty trip. Meaning that you must take some time and return to your root’s, where the rest of your family may be.

     This time was not any different than the other trips home for the past few years. My eighty year old father was now staying at a nursing home. Not a retirement home but one of those anestically type homes for ones that cannot take care of themselves any longer. In my fathers case he was too much of a handful for my mother to take care of any longer. My mother was five years younger than my father, and though seeming to be more frail she still had all of her wits about her.

  When we arrived at the home to visit my father, my mother was already there. I think she is always there, weather it was for the guilt of placing my father there or for her unending love for the man, she has stayed by his side. We walked through the doors to the main desk and the receptionist greet us as though she knew who we were and directed us to the location of my folks.

     As we walked through the halls lined with people of all ages in wheel chairs and beds and with nurses walking about we could smell the stench urine. We soon came to a room where there was a gathering and there stood my mother behind my father looking so frail and in a wheel chair. He was the first to notice me there and a slight smile appeared on his face. I thought that he recognized me, but then was apparent that he wasn’t sure who I was until my mother told him that it was me.

     We talked for a while and then we went to his room that was shared with another man much younger than my father. Our visit was short and I am not so sure that my father knew weather we had been there or not.  my father looked out the window and made notice that the leaves on the trees had changed to beautiful colors. We kissed and hugged goodbye saying see you the next time, all the while I was thinking to my self that this may very well be the last time that I was to see him alive.

     On our four hour trip back home the sun was shining brightly and the further south we traveled home the more the brilliant the leaves looked on the trees. I could help but think of how my father had commented on the changing colors of the leaves. My wife spoke out and said how beautiful the foliage looked and that very soon there would be the ugly of winter setting in and no color left except for the gray of winter clouds and the leafless trees.

    This I imagined is how life is the new breath, the new birth of spring. The growing and exhilarating 0through summer. Then the aging beauty of fall. The winter solstice of death. 

     Will my father still be here for my next duty vacation?