WAITING FOR RETIREMENT

Ms. Munirah came out onto her porch every morning. She was always smiling, and she always sat down with a big, hot cup of coffee. Outside is filled with cool morning smells of hot java and wet earth.

 
There was something she yearned for beneath her sunny facade that Ms. Munirah couldn’t wait to let go of. Retirement was not far off on the horizon, and she was chomping at the bit to free her desk of her worthiness to serve, and her bottom from her sense of duty. She’d been doing what she used to do for so long. She had spent years wearing her worthiness to serve and her sense of duty around her bottom like a skin that felt as tight and hot as the back of a frog, even though she had spent decades in her desk chair doing what she had to do, poring over spreadsheets and reports, but all that was about to come to a gratifying end.

True to her sense of humour, Ms. Munirah had cultivated a habit. She would put on her pyjamas under her mac; she loved macs; it was a tradition, she told me, to discard dresses at the end of a working life as she retired to relax and take things easy, to explore her ‘Mr Magoos’. The mac was a washerwoman’s apron.
Shuffling through the pile of bills and junk mail piled up on her porch one day, she saw it: a flyer for discounted golf lessons. She giggled like a little girl. Her heart quickened with joy, and laughter escaped from her lips upon a gentle breeze. ‘I hereby name myself as the reigning champion of the world of senior golf tournaments!

And so, before we knew what was happening, the lady had us all excited. She was going on and on throughout the day about this new game and how wonderful it was. She showed us her beautiful clubs and a picture of a green and talked about how she would win this trophy. She mimes the different swings and the suave sinking in of the putt. After a few minutes of trying to replay the entire movie in one go—forgetting to wait and listen to us—she eventually takes a break. She passes the story along to her neighbours, and then all of us are there in her room talking about nothing but this new passion. By the time she was finished, the whole neighbourhood had been talked into Ms. Munirah’s opening foray into a career on the greens.