The plus fifty-ness is a plate, full of hard nuts. The real blows are on dining table. I hate remembering adoctor, especially when I am in front of a delicious plate. In fact I compare the pool of doctors with the airline companies: we give them business and they take us for a ride. Once I asked my doctor about the food I should be careful about. He said, “Put anything on your tongue, and if it tastes good, spit it out.”
The diet restrictions make me crazy. It has closed down all the sweet shops in the city. When such shop passes by the window of my car, I feel what Majanoo would have been feeling while Laila’s Barrat might be going away.
Another enemy is time. Passing the time is a grave management issue. As I have retired prematurely, I pass time in reading. Blogging is the latest disease I have acquired through Internet. I read too much. And hence I believe that I can help people by providing useful stock of advices. But no one asks for my advice. Every one, my young entrepreneur son, educated daughters, and my fixed-deposits-wealthy wife had passed the phase wherein they needed me. While at home, I feel like I am sitting on a municipal garbage container and the whole traffic goes on without looking at me.
Wise people say that, “Forgive, forget and be happy.” The forgiving is not my problem; people have forgiven me for whatever I had done in and out of my office premises. But the forgetting is the real foe. Today I was standing at the top of stairs, and I failed to remember whether I had come up or I was about to go down. The other day, I was sitting on the edge of my bed and I could not decide whether I was going to sleep or I had just woken up. “Do you remember it’s a pension day?” My life shot at me, and I recalled that it must be morning.
But for the men and women, if any, in fifties, there is nothing to worry about. For them I would cite the example of one of our evening-walk friends. Mr. Replacement, it is his nickname. He is a model man. He has got most of his body parts replaced. He has new cornea in left eye; a brand new knee fitted in right leg; and Ben Kingsly type denture. He charismatically wears golden frame glasses and a wig made from the hair of a black goat. And he is going to replace his heart’s valve, too. But the gentle man’s mind-machine is still in working condition, running condition at 83. Before twenty years his family doctor had told him to renounce the love forsugar and all other sugary things. He did not. Since then his three family doctors have died and he is not-out with all his replacements. (Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
