Forty Years on a Spool of Wire
A man stood in his boat a while back holding a spool of wire.
He’d had it forty years. Bought it young, used it a little at a time across a whole life of projects and fixes and jobs that needed a length of wire, and now he was down to the last few wraps of it. And it hit him, the way a thing will hit you sideways when you’re not braced for it, that the wire running out was the years running out. Forty years spun off that spool a foot at a time while he wasn’t looking, and what was left on the roll was about what was left of him. He said so, out loud, to his wife, who was filming him. And she looked at him and made a joke about his ball cap.
He said, “Okay, I’m done.” And he walked off.
That video has been watched better than three million times, and it started a war in the comments that hasn’t fully quit a year and a half later. Half the internet thought the man was a fool crying over hardware. The other half watched their own father, their own husband, their own selves in that boat and felt something crack open. I know which half I was in before I finished watching. I’ve got that spool. Mine’s just not wire.
I want to talk about that man, because I know him. I was raised by him.