After moving to Cape Town from Johanessburg, I decided it would be a good idea to go back up to Johanessburg for an extended visit to my parent’s house. Since I left home the first time I would go for regular visits as often as possible, but in the last seven months I have become unemployed and have reluctantly terminated my studies which are the reason I moved away from home in the first place. Now unemployed and devotedly skeptical of middle class being, my parents think I have gone wrong in the head. Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t, who is to say? I refuse to be gentrified and I am firm on this.
Going home after being away can be a strange and confusing situation for all parties concerned. Everybody just tries so hard to be normal and make everything as it was before, but the whole time there is an underlying tension. Fathers want to be fathers, mothers mothers, and the child, now grown up, is expected to slip right back into the role to accommodate the respective roles of the rest of the family. This is not easy as since the child left home he has been forced become his own father and own mother, metaphorically speaking of course.

One night I was drinking coffee and sitting in the lounge with my mom and dad. It was a Thursday night and as always the television was too loud. Some lady on the television was talking about her amazing experiences refurnishing her home: gripping stuff. Out of the blue my dad turned the television onto mute and told my mom and I about a workshop he attended at work earlier this week called ‘retirement awareness workshop’. Why he told us this story is unclear, my dad is like that – he just tells irrelevant stories. Or rather, his stories are not irrelevant he just fails to express himself; there is no sense of contextualization or introducing the story, its just information, no package. This is no fault of his own he comes from a world where men don’t need to explain themselves to subordinates and a world, unfortunately where my mom and myself happen to fall into that category. Nevertheless, he continued with his harangue, and it turns out that the retirement awareness workshop was open to all employees but especially those around fifty years old and its message was the importance of working hard.
“You only have 40 to 45 years to work” said my dad declared assertively, “then you need an income to last you 15 or more years. It’s frightening.”
I imagined working for 45 years in the same job and could not even begin to comprehend what that meant for me. But I did agree with him, not because it really did frighten me, but because he is too old to ever be convinced that maybe working for 45 years in the same job and then running out of money when you are old is not the most frightening thing. For me having to work for 45 years in the same job is far scarier. But to be fair and get a discussion going I pointed out that he could still make money by fixing the motorbikes which has been a hobby and a reliable mode of extra income for my dad over the last 15 years and there would be no reason that would need to stop.
“Work on bikes? I’ll be over 65” he said as if I had said something so stupid and obviously so. This could get ugly, I decided to diffuse the situation and asked him teasingly if he would move into a retirement village. He took offence and left the room. It was late and my dad suffers from nocturnal crankiness, a common form of crankiness in the paterfamilias which is amplified whenever authority is questioned. I then told my mom that retirement damages the environment. She is always in the zone when she gets home from work, exhausted from traffic and drained by the TV. You could tell her anything, she’s not listening, all she does is nod and echo a few seemingly central phrases the person addressing her has used.
“Pristine wetland. Drained and turned into retirement villages. You know why wetland areas are important”. I asked.
“For rivers” she answered while seizing the opportunity of my dads absence from the room to change the channel, she is a fan of the crime investigation genre. ‘For rivers’? What kind of answer was that? I was sure she was not following but I went on anyway, “They purify water. Reeds and clay extract pollutants and impurities, they are like massive filters”.
I waited for my mom’s response. It wasn’t coming she was on another planet. So I went on, “You know why retirement villages end up in wetlands?” I asked her as I took a big sip of coffee, and without waiting for her answer continued, “Because it is cheaper than the higher spots. Higher spots have views and views are for people who are working and the better the view the more successful the person who owns it. It’s symbolic”.
My mom pretended to agree and gave me a nod which said ‘I know’. I drank the last bit of coffee which made me feel awesome, I was on a roll and feeling excited. “Old people have a greater negative impact on the environment than other people”. This is obviously untrue but she was no longer there and I was coffeed up, I could tell her anything. Then I thought I would try catching her out for not listening and ask her a question and wait for her response. I asked her if she thought that old people were dead weight and that maybe they (my parents) don’t need retirement villages and retirement funds. My mom completely misanswered me.
“Things have changed” she said, “people are living longer. They want to work hard for their last ten years because they are in their mental prime”. Not the answer I was expecting but I guess she was tired.

I am lying on my bed supine. The enjoyment of the coffees has long passed and left me with nausea and an ontological discomfort, the name of which I don’t know nor can I ever clearly explain it. Lying on my back does help though. I thought about what I once heard a hippie tell a girl who was feeling sick after drinking too much beer and having smoked too much pot, “have three glasses of milk and a piece of toast”. I thought about my dad and his retirement workshop. How they programme people at their lowest ebb to be productive for those last 10 or 15 years. I imagined his last day of work. It would be a Friday. He would decline when invited by his colleagues to join them for a final drink. Instead he goes home. Once at home he gets the ladder from the garage, writes a note and climbs into the ceiling. The note which is addressed to my mom reads ‘gone into retirement you know what needs doing’.
In the ceiling my dad wraps himself in that pink ceiling insulation padding. My mom gets home she reads the note. She understands. She goes up the ladder into the roof, she finds the huge pink bundle which is now my dad and rolls him out of the roof and into the cars boot. She telephones my aunt, her sister, and tells her about the retirement. My aunt is understanding, “We all need to retire sometime”. My mom is comforted. She begins to pack for the journey. She calls around and gets paid out by my dad’s retirement fund. Luckily he saved all those years. Thank God for policies. Next stop Bloubergstrand, Cape Town, about one thousand five hundred kilometers away.
Two weeks later that cocoon of pink insulating padding begins to writhe. It is now in the middle of a small retirement cottage in the senior quarter of Bloubergstrand located in what used to be a wetland. First the movement is hardly noticeable but soon it is looks like a worm which has just been frightened when digging in the garden. The contractions become more and more violent. The flick-flacking becomes faster and faster until it ceases from sheer exhaustion. The lull is short lived, it lasts five or ten minutes and then the roll of pink begins to flick-flack as violently as it had before it stopped. Then just when it seems that it can move no faster the cocoon tears down the middle and a cloud of pink smoky dust fills the room. When the dust settles there in the middle of the room stands the most magnificent golden retriever. The beast is in its prime, its coat possesses a perfect lustre, and it already has a stick in its mouth ready for a run on the beach or some other activity where companionship is central.