At Gary Goldenberg’s retirement party, someone brought a chocolate sheet cake that said “Congratulations!” in blue frosting, the kind that stained teeth and clothes and possibly internal organs. No one knew who paid for it. HR maybe.
They had it in Conference Room B, because Conference Room A had a leaking ceiling tile and a mysterious smell no one wanted to trace.
Gary, age 66, stood in front of the group, trying to look humble while Marcy from HR gave a speech about his “immeasurable contributions,” which mostly involved enforcing style guides and preventing verbs from turning into nouns.
He gave a short thank-you speech. “I don’t know what comes next,” he said, smiling just enough. “Maybe I’ll take up fly fishing. Or pottery. Maybe I’ll just sit around and become irritating.”
The room chuckled. They assumed he was joking.
Then they gave him a card filled with illegible notes and a coffee mug that said World’s Okayest Writer.
When he left the building that last time, Joel from the front office called out, “Don’t forget to send a postcard from paradise!”
Gary waved, already wondering if he had milk in the fridge.
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The first week was exactly as imagined. He slept in. He made eggs without rushing. He sat on the balcony with coffee and a sense of victory.
The second week was less crisp. The coffee tasted flat. He watched a documentary about a guy who lived in a converted school bus and made furniture out of driftwood. Gary googled “How much does a school bus cost?” and then closed the tab.
By the third week he was reading old instruction manuals for no reason. He found himself mentally editing them.
One morning, after reorganizing the silverware drawer in a way that made it objectively worse, he sat down and opened Reddit.
He hit post, then argued with a stranger about Oxford commas for two hours.
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His daughter called one afternoon. “Dad, how’s it going? What’ve you been up to?”
He glanced at the spreadsheet on his screen titled MoneyUntilDeath_v4_FINAL and minimized it.
“Just relaxing,” he said. “You know. Taking it easy.”
“You’ve earned it,” she said warmly. “You were always working. It’s good to slow down.”
“Sure. Yeah. Slow’s the word.”
He made a grilled cheese for dinner and burned one side.
Later that night he got into a three-hour argument online about whether a semicolon should be considered emotionally equivalent to a period. He had opinions. Deep ones.
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He tried therapy again. The new therapist was named Karen and had gentle eyes and a master’s degree in something. Her office smelled like eucalyptus and mild disappointment.
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” Gary said. “I mean, I spent forty years correcting other people’s bad writing. And now I don’t even care if the milk expires.”
Karen nodded. “Maybe the question isn’t what you should do, but what you want to do.”
Gary stared at her. “I want to care that the milk expires.”
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A month later he tried volunteering at the local library. On his first day they gave him a cart of books and asked him to shelve the fiction section.
He stood in front of the shelves, overwhelmed by a sea of author names and the existential weight of alphabetizing.
He shelved four books, had a coughing fit, and went home early. They never called him back, and he didn’t follow up.
He downloaded a habit-tracking app and deleted it after two days when it sent a notification that said “Keep Going, Gary!” in a font that made him irrationally angry.
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He started going to the grocery store every day. Not because he needed anything, but because it was open and warm and full of people pretending they had somewhere else to be.
He began recognizing the cashier. Her name was Rachel. She had pink hair and the slow patience of someone who had been alive longer than she looked.
“Back again?” she said, scanning his bananas and one can of lentil soup.
“Just stretching my legs,” Gary said.
“Living the dream,” she said.
“Trying,” he said.
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At one point he considered teaching again. He sent a few emails to local community colleges. No one responded. One bounced back.
He wrote a sample syllabus and immediately got depressed.
The document was saved as Comp101_Revised_PessimisticDraft.docx and never opened again.
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When he turned 69, he threw himself a small birthday party. He bought a cake from Safeway, wrote “Happy Retirement” on it in frosting himself, and ate two slices while watching a video titled “Minimalist Living in a Converted Grain Silo.”
That night he wrote the first poem he had written in decades. It was about a pigeon with one foot and a look of permanent resentment.
He wrote a second poem the next day. Then none for a month.
He labeled the folder on his desktop “Pigeon Thoughts.”
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By 71, things started to slow down.
He had a harder time standing up from the couch. He watched TV without watching. The Reddit arguments no longer interested him. Or maybe the people just got dumber.
He started editing his will, then editing it again, as though the precise wording might make him feel something.
One version left money to a dog rescue. One left it to a poetry foundation he made up.
He began writing little letters and not sending them. Some were to his daughter. Some were to former coworkers. One was to Rachel at the grocery store, but he never gave it to her.
Mostly, he wanted to say thank you to someone, but wasn’t sure for what.
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One day he lit a joint, finally, after all those years of worrying about drug tests.
He sat back and waited for the world to bloom.
Instead, his mouth went dry and his knees ached.
He turned on the TV and watched a baking competition until he fell asleep.
The joint sat half-smoked in an ashtray, right next to a sticky note that read, “Buy more bread?”
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When he passed, quietly and without drama, his daughter cleaned out the condo. She found the poems. The one about the pigeon made her laugh and then cry. She read the others. One of them was about work.
She left it on her fridge for a long time.
No one at the old office heard about his death. But one day, a new employee found an old mug in the cabinet. It said World’s Okayest Writer. She used it for tea.
The blue frosting stain in Conference Room B never fully came out. But no one remembered what caused it. Just that it had been a party.
