“Fifty years of being needed every single day, and then one Tuesday, nothing.

Like they turned you off.” We talked for two hours that first morning, about work and children and the strange grief of a freedom you didn’t ask for, and when I drove home I realized it was the longest real conversation I’d had since the move, and that I’d made a friend, at sixty, over a burst hose, which is not a thing I would have believed possible six weeks earlier when I sat at my empty planner and thought my life was essentially over.

I had forgotten how to make a friend.

That is a thing that happens to serious working people and no one warns you about it either: your friendships become logistical, colleagues and couples-you-see, people slotted into a life so full of function that there is no room left for the strange, inefficient, purposeless companionship that you made without effort at twenty and cannot for the life of you remember how to make at sixty.