What the garden showed me, in Sal’s small kitchen with a pill organizer open between us, was that the knowledge had never been the problem.

The walls had been the problem.

Take the same skill out of the boardroom and set it down beside a sick old man who has kept a neighborhood alive for forty-one years, and it is not obsolete at all.

It is a form of love.

I was still the person who understood those medications better than anyone in that garden; that had not been retired out of me; it had only been waiting for a kitchen table where it mattered again.

And it turned out the difference between a discarded expertise and a treasured one was nothing but proximity — being close enough to another human being to hand them the thing you know.