And standing in that dusk, filthy and exhausted and passing a bucket into Connie’s hands, I felt a thing I had not felt since the day they took the scaffolding down: I felt necessary.

Not needed the way a title makes you needed.

Needed the way a person is needed by other people who are standing right next to them in the dark, doing a hard thing together, because it matters and because they are there.

I had spent my whole career inside a certain idea of importance.

I had been important the way a keystone is important — remove me and something fails, a system depends on my judgment, my absence is a problem.

It is a real kind of importance and I do not sneer at it; it got me up in the morning for three decades.