Pensioned Off: Baby Boomers out to Pasture.

By Sue Dawson

Retirement - is it a wasteland or a wonderland? Ruth, Trudy and some other baby-boomers they meet along the way, are about to find out. Drawn together by a love of music, they form a ukulele band which takes them on a journey far beyond their original intention of giving free concerts in nursing homes.
They face challenges common to their age group but this feel-good fiction is designed to put a smile on the reader’s face.
Set in Auckland, New Zealand, its message is universal; that there is life after hanging up one’s work boots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664107441

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Copyright © 2022 by Sue Dawson.

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recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and

such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/08/2022

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Dedicated to my grandchildren, Dexter, Quinn, and Hazel, who were the inspiration for some of the antics of a certain child in this story.

Also my niece, Ema Barton, who filled me in on how professional musicians operate.

CHAPTER 1

Congratulations on your retirement.

While the money isn’t good, the hours certainly are.

Ruth stared out the window she’d worked so hard to be near, inching her way gradually towards it as strategic colleagues left. It was her reminder that the world was bigger than just Abacus Advertising. The jagged Auckland city skyline spread out in front of her, the Sky Tower piercing the clouds like a giant hypodermic needle. She refreshed her computer screen and made a desultory attempt to tap away at the annual report she was drafting for a client. That was her lot these days. The days of being the Queen of the Jingles, an award-winning copy writer, a hip and happening force in the world of advertising, had drifted into the past. The first signs came in the kind of advertisements she was given to write. Ads for exciting holidays, glamorous clothes, and trendy shops were replaced with those for retirement homes, funeral plans, and incontinence products. Eventually, even those dried up, and she became the go-to person for annual reports and informative pamphlets—a safe pair of hands. She sometimes felt like an old racehorse put out to pasture. Other times, she backed herself more and reminded herself that it took brains and experience to pull a good report together. She wondered how some of the younger offbeat creative types that peopled the office now would handle it.

There was only one of those young creatives that Ruth felt any real affinity with. Isobel, a twenty-something, emo-inspired copywriter, treated her as an equal, with a generous dollop of respect even. She was literally Ruth’s right-hand woman as she happened to sit next to her.

‘How’s it hanging, Ruth?’ Isobel said as she returned to her desk. ‘Hard at it, I see,’ her smile reaching her marmite-brown eyes. ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Tristan the Terrible has summonsed you to his almighty presence.’

Isobel shared her dislike for their cocky young boss.

‘Oh, damn,’ Ruth replied. ‘But it could be some exciting new project he’s got for me or a pay rise,’ she fantasised.

The look on Tristan’s face was a strange mixture of nerves and satisfaction. This did not bode well, Ruth decided. Her dream of a positive outcome dissipated.

‘We’re about to have a bit of a shake-up at Abacus, quite exciting, really.’ Ruth had a sudden vision of Tristan as a vicious dog shaking the life out of her between his teeth. ‘We’ve landed some large contracts with some big-shot companies for multimedia advertisements, so we are going to stop taking in big corporate writing jobs as they are time consuming and don’t offer a big-enough return, so I’m very sorry, Ruth, but . . .’ He hesitated.

Ruth jumped in to finish his sentence with words that owed a lot to reality television. ‘But your time on this show has ended. So that’s it, isn’t it,’ a statement, not a question.

‘You’ve been a marvellous asset to the company, and, of course, I’ll be sorry to lose you,’ he lied.

‘I’d better get redundancy pay.’ Ruth broke into his bullshit speech, hot tears lining up ready to be unleashed. She looked up to the heavens in an effort to keep the floodgates closed.

‘Well, yes, in accordance with your contract, there will be some compensation.’

‘And it had better be decent or I’ll call in the employment lawyers,’ she added as a parting shot as she left the room. She didn’t, however, think Tristan would be quaking in his boots.

Of course, she had tried to imagine a life without her job. It wasn’t the money that kept her going. It was all tied up with her sense of purpose, mental stimulation, and that inner treasure, self-worth. To a lesser extent, even her social interactions were catered for in her job. As the years went by and the digital natives took over, making her feel somewhat marginalised, her colleague Isobel was the one shining light in her work social life. She could just tolerate most of the other Gen X/millennials, but she didn’t have to try with Isobel. She had blurred the lines a bit when she had invited her to join her pub quiz team, the Sexagenarians. Despite, as the name suggested, the others all being in their sixties, she had blended in easily, and her up-to-date knowledge of popular culture had proved invaluable.

Isobel was shocked when Ruth broke her news.

‘He can’t just do that!’ she exclaimed.

‘He can ’cos he just did,’ came Ruth’s weak reply.

‘I’ll miss you. You’re the best thing about this place (apart from the money). Who else am I going to moan to or joke with?’

‘I know,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ll miss you too, but I’ll still see you at quiz every week, I hope?’

‘Of course,’ said Isobel, hugging her.

What was she going to do with herself? She had a few loose ideas, but they were always consigned to sometime in the future, which had now brutally turned into the present.

‘I know what I could do,’ she announced to Isobel after her colleague had suggested a consolatory cup of tea in the café downstairs. ‘I’ll go freelance and produce the reports and pamphlets that Tristan has decided are too fuddy-duddy for Abacus to be associated with. I’ve got all the contacts. I could do as much or as little as I pleased. I don’t need Tristan. He can take a running jump.’

‘That sounds like a great plan, Ruth. As long as you factor in plenty of you-time and live a little. I don’t like to be morbid, but my granddad slogged his guts out until he eventually retired at seventy, and within six months, he dropped dead. He and Granny never got their trip together back to their ancestral home in Scotland. Not saying that’s likely to happen to you, Ruth, but you just don’t know.’

CHAPTER 2

Happy retirement Ruth

Put your feet up and rest

Or have some adventures

While you’ve still got some zest.

Ruth snapped the oversized card shut in thinly disguised disgust. That was the last straw in the messages her colleagues had scribbled in her farewell card. There had been several more in a similar vein. Only Isobel had written anything heartfelt and genuine. In the speech that followed, young boss Tristan waxed lyrical about her long service.

‘She was a pioneer in the industry,’ he contended. ‘She’ll be going on to a well-deserved rest.’

She felt like she’d gatecrashed her own funeral. Her mostly millennial colleagues stood around, wine glasses in hand, smiling and nodding. A large box was handed to her, which, to her horror, contained the most sinister-looking coffee machine resembling Darth Vader. She feigned delight, wondering what on earth she would do with it. She didn’t even drink coffee! She pulled herself together to try and make a strong, positive speech to hide her vulnerability. But all the little digs she had planned to resist dropping in pooled like bile in her throat. Their only way was out.

‘I’ve been aboard the good ship Abacus Advertising longer than I care to remember. I was once where you are now and am now where perhaps you will be one day, if you’re lucky. I’d just like to say, my dear colleagues, that you haven’t seen the last of me yet. And that’s a threat.’ She laughed, remembering the old adage about things said in jest.

She’d made it clear that she hadn’t wanted to retire just yet. She had sailed into her sixties feeling she still had the mind and enthusiasm of a forty-year-old. She’d kept up with the play, more or less. Work had been her happy place despite the current culture. It had defined her. It also happened to be the only job she’d ever had, apart from a holiday job in a gasket factory. She had started work straight from university. She’d been drawn to working with words; as almost as soon as she could write, she had taken pleasure in writing little poems.

‘There’s more to advertising than just writing little poems. It’s a cut-throat industry,’ someone had warned her, but her throat had stayed reasonably intact until recently.

Abacus Advertising had been a small friendly firm then. Hugh had been the epitome of a good boss. One of the other copywriters, Gavin, soon caught her eye, and they eventually married and had two children, Melanie and Matthew. Gavin later spread his wings in a variety of ways. He left Abacus to start his own firm, which involved lots of late nights and absences. He took up gliding but, unfortunately, clipped a tree on a descent and nosedived into the next world. Newly widowed, Ruth discovered the reason for some of the late nights and absences in the form of a sobbing stranger at the funeral. This betrayal put Ruth right off relationships, and she threw herself into work and her children. The children grew up, filtered through universities, and flew the nest. Daughter Melanie to career, marriage, and family in multiple cities, currently Perth, and Matthew to Saudi Arabia. Ruth downsized to a unit in Herne Bay with a peep of the sea through the kitchenette window.

A career highlight had been a trio of wins at the Television Ad awards, where her jingle-writing talents earned her the top award of Best Advertisement of 1976 and again in 1998 and 2007. Soon after the last win, Hugh had retired, and Tristan the Terrible swept into power like a new broom, determined to sweep her on to the scrap heap.

‘He gave us one of those silly bird personality tests,’ Ruth had moaned to her sister, Linda. ‘Of course, I came out looking too much like an owl and a bit of dove, which apparently means I’m resistant to change and set in my ways. Tristan prefers eagles and peacocks in his aviary. I get the stuff nobody else wants.’

‘I don’t know why you put up with it,’ Linda replied. ‘You should retire like me.’

Ruth hadn’t been able to take that step on her own and continued to get passed over for the more interesting projects. She recalled one of the first times it happened, when Tristan gave an account she had deemed admirably suited for someone of her age and experience to a young man called Mikey. That was a stab in her solar plexus. Mikey thought himself ‘cool’ with his low-slung jeans and his man bun. He thought he was God’s gift to music and popular culture, but to Ruth, he was a supercilious little prat. In his spare time, he was the lead vocalist (screamologist) in a band called Cleft Palate, which had been hired to play at the work Christmas do. They made her ears ring and proved that the generation gap was alive and well.

‘That boy will have vocal nodules before he’s thirty,’ she tried to tell the guy next to her through the cacophony, but she gave up. Mikey Man-Bun, as Ruth privately referred to him, thought he was the bee’s knees because he had won an award at the latest Television Ad awards, even if it was in the Worst Ad category. There was still prestige in that, apparently. Then came that day when the retirement decision had been abruptly taken out of her hands.

‘But, Ruth, you’ll be fine, because you’ve got your pension and some redundancy. Think of the fun you’ll have!’ came Tristan’s smooth words of reassurance.

Retire, Rewire, Re-fire were the affirmations Ruth had running through her head on repeat. The retirement ogre that had lurked on Ruth’s horizon like a storm cloud had landed. It was her first real day of retirement, day one of the rest of her life. She woke at ten minutes to six. She didn’t need an alarm: all those early starts had built one into her. She switched on her bedside radio and listened to the breakfast hosts bantering on about weekday-itis and traffic jams. The day stretched out before her like a large grey blanket. She’d have to weave some colours into that blanket or she’d lose her mind. She pulled on some clothes. It was ‘Goodbye Corporate Chic, Hello Track Pants!’

She sat at her computer and composed an email to send out to some of her old clients announcing that she was at their service as a freelance copywriter. She felt better now she had made a start on her new life but still felt the need to unburden her soul to someone who was a good listener. She called her friend Colleen, whom she had known since her time on a kindergarten committee back in the ’80s. She heaved a sigh of relief when Colleen answered. She was a hard woman to pin down. Since her retirement, she had thrown herself into a frenzy of volunteering. Shifts at the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, listening to children’s reading at her local school, a regular afternoon in an opportunity shop, fighting the Auckland traffic delivering library books and meals on wheels to the housebound and taxiing them to hospital appointments meant that she was seldom available for a good natter.

‘Can I shout you lunch at the Chinese up the road? I need to talk to somebody my own age.’

‘What’s wrong, Ruth? Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it when I see you?’

‘Can’t do today, but tomorrow’s good. Must dash. See you then.’

Colleen rushed into the restaurant where Ruth was waiting. They helped themselves to a buffet lunch, and Ruth unburdened herself in between vacuuming noodles into her mouth with as much decorum as she could muster.

‘You love being retired, don’t you, Colleen?’ she ventured.

‘Not really. I don’t feel like I’m really retired exactly. I need to be busy, although sometimes I feel like I’m in line for volunteer burnout. I’ll probably keep going until I’m too old to be any use to anyone. I hope I’ll be able to recognise when that is.’

‘Maybe it’s easier if you’ve got a partner,’ Ruth pondered.

‘You’ve met my cousin Janet, haven’t you?’ said Colleen. ‘As soon as they qualify for their gold cards, she and hubby are going to be off camper-vanning around the country or coach-touring around Europe or growing orchids in glasshouses. Mind you, it’s all talk at this stage. She might find it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.’

‘True,’ concurred Ruth. ‘My sister Linda found her husband had morphed into a real homebody post-retirement. She jokes that he may as well be on home detention. She’s had to develop her own interests, like e-biking, quilting, and line dancing, for example. I could join her if she didn’t live way down in Napier. Although I can’t imagine me on any sort of a bike,’ she said, wriggling her well-padded hips.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Miss Gertrude Agnes Rankin. Trudy looked at the payslip addressed to her and, for about the millionth time, agonised over the names her parents had labelled her with. Gertrude was after Gertrude Stein (her mother had fancied herself as a bit of an intellectual), and Agnes after a distant cousin who had married into the British aristocracy. Thank goodness she could dilute it with Trudy, which was innocuous by comparison.

She felt as light as a feather, as though a big weight had been lifted off her shoulders, mellowed by a few wines from the end-of-year teachers’ drinkies, which had doubled as her farewell. Actually, it had been a bulk farewell. The others were going off to new schools, new jobs outside of teaching, travel, further study, maternity, whereas she was going to that graveyard called retirement. She didn’t honestly think of it as a graveyard, more of a potential wonderland in fact. She had almost danced through the school gates for the last time and down the street, the short distance to her townhouse in Mount Roskill. Unfortunately, she’d still be able to hear the playground noise, but, hopefully, she’d be out doing exciting things so it wouldn’t bother her too much.

She was ready to retire, whatever that meant. The last few years had been a struggle. What with the children with their complex needs and lack of respect for authority; the parents with their great expectations; the frequency of ambitious school productions; the burgeoning bureaucracy of teaching; she could go on and on. Basically, she’d had enough. She’d spent all her adult life paddling upstream, teaching music to kids who either didn’t want to be there or expected to become Brian May or Nigel Kennedy without the dedication or practice. She’d had her successes, like Amy Chan and Dougal Watson, who’d joined the Auckland Philharmonia and Chance Tahana and the Downey brothers, who were part of successful rock bands. Whether she’d actually played a pivotal part in their successes, she wasn’t sure. Teaching had its advantages, like the holidays and the steady income. She had travelled whenever she could and paid off her mortgage.

She’d seen an advertisement for the University of the Third Age in the library, which ran all manner of classes not too far from her home patch. She ran her eye down the list looking for something that piqued her interest. Comparative Religion, chess, local history, probably not. Art Appreciation; that’s a possibility. Wait. They were looking for a teacher for their beginners’ ukulele class. I could do that, she thought. It would mean being a teacher rather than a student, but that was OK; she liked to have the upper hand. Damn, it was at the same time as the Art Appreciation. Never mind.

She was still sizing up her options when she was dishing up her cat Marie’s dinner later that day.

‘I could maybe book an extended trip to Europe, not just confined to the northern hemisphere winter, or take a cruise,’ she told the cat, who didn’t seem impressed and turned her whiskers towards her bowl with a plaintive meow. ‘You wouldn’t like that much, would you, my darling, because you’d be going to the C-A-T-T-E-R-Y,’ she continued. Marie gave a short squeak. ‘Perhaps I’ll even revive my search for someone to share my twilight years with, other than an overweight cat with an attitude,’ she ventured. The thought of dying alone was something she found quite alarming. What if she wasn’t found for days, weeks even? Would Marie resort to eating her? She’d heard of that happening. Marie was used to having her food at hand; she wasn’t much of a mouser.

‘I’m not exactly an old maid,’ she mused, glancing down at her still youthful-when-clothed figure, even though Marie’s attention was now on her bowl of Fancy Feast. ‘I’ve had my share of relationships. No one lasted the distance or we couldn’t coexist in each other’s space after a while. Perhaps it could be different now.’ She continued her soliloquy, warming to her subject. ‘Now that I’m less pressured, I’ve probably mellowed,’ she said hopefully. On the other hand, when she really thought about it, could she actually bear to have some bloke in her life 24/7? Perhaps one of those modern part-time relationships would suit her. She’d given up telling Marie and was internalising now. A plus-one for social occasions, someone to avoid the single supplement on holidays, and a bit of a bedtime frolic when the mood took her. She’d filled her life with her career and her spare time with hobbies and adventures and had almost convinced herself that she was lucky to be unencumbered with husbands, children, and grandchildren. There was, however, still a part of her that longed for those things. Perhaps she could find a man with children and grandchildren she could share?

One thing she was going to miss about her job was the staff social club. Perhaps it was because she’d been an only child, but she didn’t make friends easily. Twice a term, she went on outings with the club, like car rallies or winery visits, where she could pretend she had friends. Boyfriends had come and gone over the years and filled the void temporarily. Any tenuous friendships she’d made at the posh girls’ school she’d been sent to had disintegrated when they’d gone their separate ways. She’d had her friend Sue from university, which she felt was quite an achievement in a place where it was notoriously difficult to befriend people. Sue married a chap called Brian and had a couple of kids, but their friendship had survived until recently. Trudy couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong there.

She decided to be proactive as regards finding a man of her own. She’d read about the law of attraction and decided there was no harm in putting it to the test. She was normally extremely sceptical about things like that and put them in the same basket as conspiracy theories and homeopathy, but there was a power these beliefs had to somehow put their hooks into the desperate and find them making exceptions for all kinds of crackpot ideas. She conjured up the foxiest silver fox she could imagine and filed him in her memory banks. Then the next week, when she was seated in the doctor’s rooms waiting for the nurse to usher her in for her triennial cervical smear, while leafing through one of the dog-eared magazines, something caught her attention. It was an advertisement for a fancy aftershave and showed the rear view of a man standing on a beach watching the sunset, probably pleased with himself for smelling sophisticated with no five o’clock shadow. He looked like he belonged to the genus silver fox, dressed in grey slacks and a navy-coloured jersey. Yes, from the back, he looked just her type. An actual image of her dream man would be better than just a mental image. She wasn’t the type to tear things out of waiting room magazines, although evidence pointed to the fact that there were a few of them about. She glanced nervously around her, checking that all eyes were averted, and snapped the image with her phone. She felt the power in that picture to draw that type of man into her life, her faceless man of mystery.

CHAPTER 3

Don’t shirk

On housework

But do it with ease

With Exit Grease.

—one of Ruth’s early jingle efforts

Ruth filled the jug up for her morning cuppa. It was her first Monday as a retiree. There was sunshine on her windowsill where her little solar dancing doll was hula-ing enthusiastically, holding her tiny ukulele.

‘Hi, Leilani.’ She’d named her after the old song that went ‘Sweet Leilani, Heavenly Flower . . .’ ‘You’ve certainly got your groove on this morning.’

She could see the little strip of harbour in the distance sparkling and twinkling. She shovelled down her Special K, rinsed her dishes, and thought, What now? She could hear her neighbour Vijay leaving for work. Lucky guy, she thought. ‘I wonder if he realises how lucky he is,’ she muttered to the plastic figure who just continued her dance marathon.

She checked her emails on her tablet; no replies from any of the firms she’d contacted yet.

The outside world seemed like it was inviting Ruth to get out and walk amongst it, but, no, she