The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement

At eight o’clock on Friday morning, I was moving through Trader Joe’s at my customary speed, which is somewhere between brisk shopping and evacuation. I hurled groceries into my cart with the urgency of a man who had been informed that at precisely 8:30 he would turn into a giant pumpkin.

This is not because I dislike Trader Joe’s. I love Trader Joe’s. But at sixty-four, I have developed an almost religious scrupulosity about time. Friday morning has a sequence. Shop. Drive home. Unload groceries. Put everything away. Work out. Shower. Eat lunch. Nap. Then begin the afternoon shift of academic work and personal creative projects. Disturb the sequence and the entire day threatens to collapse like a poorly stacked Jenga tower.

So there I was, scrutinizing a gigantic Japanese sweet potato, when I encountered a former colleague.

He had taught Spanish and Italian at the college and had been retired for years. Now in his eighties, he is a petite man who nevertheless carries himself with tremendous dignity: chest out, posture erect, eyes bright and alert. He looked less like someone retreating from life than someone who had simply been reassigned to another department.

He smiled.

I faced a decision.

Ordinarily, I might have offered a friendly greeting and continued moving. Conversation is dangerous when you are operating under a timetable. One innocent “How have you been?” can metastasize into twelve minutes, and twelve minutes at Trader Joe’s means the workout gets pushed back, which pushes lunch back, which pushes the nap back, which eventually threatens civilization.

But this man deserved better than a drive-by salutation.

So I stopped.

We talked for several minutes. Nothing profound. Retirement. Teaching. Life. The ordinary conversational currency exchanged by two former colleagues standing beside produce while other shoppers maneuver carts around them.

Then we parted.

Ten minutes later, I encountered him again in the pasta-sauce aisle.

He was holding a small jar of lemon pesto.

“You have to try this,” he said.

I looked at the jar.

Lemon pesto was not on the schedule.

Nevertheless, politeness prevailed. I took it, thanked him, placed it in my cart, and continued my race against the pumpkin.

By lunchtime I had forgotten about it. Then, while assembling my usual salad—arugula, tuna, garbanzo beans, diced Japanese sweet potato—I noticed the jar. I opened it and added two teaspoons.

I took a bite.

Good Lord.

The salad was magnificent.

The lemon cut through the tuna. The pesto coated the arugula. The sweetness of the Japanese potato played against the acidity and herbs. Ingredients I had eaten dozens of times suddenly seemed to have hired a new conductor. I sat there staring at my bowl with the astonishment of a chemist who had accidentally discovered penicillin.

It was easily one of the best salads I had ever made.

And I owed it to the retired foreign-language professor I had almost been too busy to talk to.

This is The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement: the older and more regimented your life becomes, the more important it is to leave small openings through which the unexpected can enter.

The principle becomes especially important as retirement approaches. Retirement frightens me partly because I can imagine life contracting. Fewer colleagues. Fewer students. Fewer accidental conversations. Fewer reasons to encounter people outside the familiar perimeter of family and friends. You can respond to this contraction by becoming increasingly efficient, arranging your days into immaculate little compartments—exercise here, lunch there, nap precisely there—until you have constructed a beautifully organized life in which absolutely nothing unexpected can happen.

This is the dark side of time management. You become so skilled at protecting your time that eventually you protect yourself from life.

The antidote does not require moving to Tuscany, learning Mandarin, or taking up hang gliding at eighty-two. Novelty can arrive in humiliatingly modest packages. Talk to someone you ordinarily would have hurried past. Listen when he recommends something. Put an unfamiliar jar in your shopping cart. Allow two teaspoons of something new to contaminate the immaculate machinery of your routine.

At sixty-four, approaching retirement, I am understandably preoccupied with what I am about to lose: professional identity, colleagues, income, structure, relevance, the daily friction of being required somewhere. But perhaps one defense against that contraction is remarkably simple. Keep the aperture open. Keep listening. Keep accepting small invitations into experiences you did not schedule.

My retired colleague had been out of the classroom for years, but that morning at Trader Joe’s he taught me something anyway.

I had interrupted my schedule for a few minutes.

The return on the investment was enormous.

Two teaspoons of lemon pesto.

And evidence that the world was not finished surprising me.