Progress report cards for old people

Annual report cards didn’t bother me in school. I did well in the subjects I liked, and the rest did not matter. As long as I was somewhere nicely hidden at the center instead of standing out due to good or bad reasons, I didn’t care.

Growing old, of late, has brought annual report cards of a different kind with newfound anxieties. My annual health report card didn’t look so good last year. It didn’t look terrible either, but I wanted to avoid being on the newspaper for suddenly dying under mysterious circumstances while, say, climbing up the stairs or sweeping and mopping the floor. If my mother could write one self-help book, it would be named, “Getting things done by nagging!” She nagged me into working on my numbers. She had high expectations of me waking up at 5 am every day and working out, which never happened. But I said goodbye to mutton, biryani, and mutton biryani (kinda!). The pandemic worked wonders too. I lost adipose with minimal effort, mostly by eating at home.

It was time for my annual report card. I found myself sweating as my mother frowned at the numbers from my bloodwork. I left it to her, I didn’t have the heart to look at the numbers myself. Looks like the undesirable higher numbers have gone down and the undesirable lower numbers have gone up. I still wonder how someone living in all-year-sunny India can have insufficient Vitamin D levels. But overall, the numbers look better than last year.

I celebrated the good numbers with mutton biryani from Arsalan and loved every grain of it!

 

sunshine