Indispensable Man

The following was in the "drafts" section of my blog. I didn't even know I had a "drafts", apparently I never posted this:


I must have reached that point where i'm realizing how smart my parents actually are.

Over this thanksgiving break my dad shared some apparently Rickover-era "shipyard wisdom" with me. Being a '90s child, I googled it and there is a poem by one Saxon N. White Kessinger, and this is the stanza that my dad quoted to me:

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining
Is a measure of how you will be missed.

But the problem is that when you pull out your hand, it is wet.  There is no indispensable man, but that's not the point. The point is the sticky nature of human relationships. We all wear pieces of each other everywhere we go and there is nothing anyone can do about it.