There is a rigidity that sets into competent people over a long career, a hardening around the fact of your own expertise, until you cannot remember the last time you were a true beginner at anything, cannot remember the particular vulnerable openness of not knowing.

It makes you brittle.

It is part of why retirement breaks people like me so badly — we have forgotten how to be bad at things, and a new life requires being bad at things, and we would rather sit in the rubble of the old competence than endure the humiliation of the new incompetence.

Sal knew this.

I am sure of it now.

When he handed me the worst plot and the worn hoe and said the ground’ll teach you, he was not only starting a gardener.