The Project Gutenberg eBook of Many happy returns of the day!, by
Ellis Parker Butler
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Title: Many happy returns of the day!
Author: Ellis Parker Butler
Release Date: June 3, 2023 [eBook #70902]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE
DAY! ***
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* * * * *
_Many Happy Returns of the Day!_
MANY HAPPY RETURNS
OF THE DAY!
By
ELLIS PARKER BUTLER
_Author of “How it Feels to be Fifty,”
“Goat-Feathers,” “Ghosts what Ain’t,” etc._
[Illustration: titlepage-logo]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
_Many Happy Returns of the Day!_
MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY!
There is one thing every person has. He may not own a dog or an
automobile or a wooden leg, but he has a birthday of his own. Even
women have them; they had them before they got the vote.
In a country the size of this, with something like one hundred and ten
million inhabitants and only three hundred and sixty-six days in the
biggest year now in use, three hundred thousand or more people have
birthdays every day. Figures like these astound the intelligence and
make reason totter on her throne. Just think! If each of the persons
having a birthday to-day received but one birthday card four inches in
length, and those cards were placed end to end, they would make a row
of birthday cards one hundred thousand feet or more than nineteen miles
long, and the cost, if figured at only ten cents each, would be thirty
thousand dollars. I wonder why I never went into the birthday-card
business!
My own birthday, the one I keep for my private use, comes on the fifth
day of December, rain or shine, even when that day falls on Sunday. I
have had it since 1869, and it is getting thin in spots and is not as
fresh and crisp as it was. It is beginning to look like a dollar bill
that has been in circulation since Grant was President; but even at
that I get a certain amount of cheer out of it, as I shall explain
later.
There was a time when my birthday was a mighty important event. For
twelve months you might wake me up any night and ask me how old I was
and I would say, ‘Eight, going on nine,’ and the moment I opened my
eyes on December 5th I was ‘nine, going on ten,’ and the most important
job I had was to look forward to the next birthday, when I would be
‘ten, going on eleven.’
But I’ve got over that. I’m not so crazy about birthdays any more.
I don’t worry about whether or not they are going to come; I have a
feeling that they are going to come along right regularly, whether I
fret about them or not. And I don’t spend much time saying to myself,
‘I’m ninety-nine, going on a hundred,’ or whatever my age may be. I’m
not interested. If anybody asks me, suddenly, how old I am, I have to
subtract 1869 from 1925, and I’m likely to miss the correct answer by
ten or twenty years. And that does not bother me, either.
December has always been a favorite birthday month in our family. My
birthday arrives a few days after I have the last tulip bulbs in the
ground, and my father’s is six days later, and my boy’s dog’s birthday
is two days after that. The dog does not get many letters concerning
his birthday, but I do--I get quite a number, and a good many are from
people I don’t know at all. That is because some newspaper syndicate
has included me in a daily feature entitled something like ‘Who Was
Born To-day.’ I suppose the people who read those birthday dates think
it is not much use writing to Adam or Moses or the man who invented
suspenders, they being too considerably elsewhere, so they write to me.
So, every year, I get quite a few birthday letters from these
unknown friends. And I like to get them, too. But I do think there
is just a little too much suggestion in some of them of an idea
that means, ‘Well, you poor old fish, here’s another of your years
gone--_you’ll_ be through before long!’
I don’t like that; I don’t vote that ticket. Being a good-natured
man--except in the bosom of my family--I have to write a line or two
to those people and say, ‘Thanks for your kind birthday wishes, you
have touched my heart’; but what I would like to write is, ‘Go on!
You’ll probably be dead twenty years before I am; go weep on your
own shoulder.’ I can’t concede that I’m crazy to be the sort of man
who looks up from his tulip-planting and gazes at his neighbor and
draws a long face and sighs, and says, ‘Yes, yes! I’m a year older
to-day--before long they’ll put me in the box with the silver handles
and plant me a little deeper than the tulip bulbs.’
When I was a boy out in Iowa, I had a friend who had a grandaunt named
Petunia Mullins, and every time her birthday came around he coaxed me
to go with him when he took a present to her. He hated to go alone, and
I did not blame him. He would climb the stairs to her flat and hesitate
at the door and then tap on it reluctantly, and when she opened to him
he would screw his face into a bright, sunny smile and hand her the
nice hand-embroidered teapot or silver-plated handkerchief, and cry
merrily, ‘Happy birthday, Aunt Petunia!’ And when she had taken the
present and had looked for the tag to see how much it had cost, she
would roll up her eyes and snuffle and say, ‘Yes, yes! it is the sad
day; I won’t be with you much longer, William.’
Up the river from us a few miles another of the boys had an uncle.
I’ll call him ‘Uncle Pethcod,’ because Pethcod is a name I don’t care
much for, and I never cared much for this man. I rowed up there in a
skiff with this Uncle Pethcod’s nephew on one of his birthdays. It was
a beautiful day--a bright sunny day--and Sam handed his uncle a classy
wall calendar all wrapped up in tissue paper and tied with a blue
ribbon. The calendar was a lovely thing, with a Gibson girl on it in
eight colors, and just as good as when Sam received it for Christmas,
except that it was a little smudged in one place where Sam had rubbed
out the ‘25 cts.’ and put ‘$1.50’ in place of it. It was a calendar any
one should have been glad to own, and it should have given that uncle
a thrill of happiness; but when he had pulled off its wrappings he
looked at it sadly and shook his head. ‘Thank you, Samuel, thank you,’
he said. ‘I always loved calendars, but I don’t expect I’ll get full
use out of this one. I shouldn’t wonder if I would be naught but a cold
blue corpse laid underground before all the days on this calendar have
passed.’
Somehow that seemed to cast an unnecessary gloom over an otherwise
perfectly good occasion. And the worst of it was that the old man was
wrong, entirely wrong, because it was a last year’s calendar and the
days on it had already passed. He might as well have been cheerful
about it.
Sometimes I think we make too much of this birthday business in this
country, or go at it the wrong way, or something. We look on our
birthdays as if our years were a pile of twenty-dollar bills and the
birthday was the day we spent the last cent of one and broke the next
into small change. I can’t see a birthday in that light at all; I don’t
become a year older on my birthday; the longest birthday I ever live
can’t make me more than twenty-four hours older than I was the day
before, and that’s nothing to get excited about. Every day does that to
me.
If you look at this thing properly, a birthday is no more important
than any one of the million ticks of a clock as the hands proceed at a
regular pace around the dial. When the hands point to twelve the clock
strikes twelve--or, if it is like some clocks I’ve owned, it strikes
eleven or twenty-two or sixteen--but that doesn’t mean an hour has
jumped past at that moment. The clock doesn’t go over in a musty corner
and sob, ‘Here’s another twelve hours gone--in a few more hours I’ll
be junk!’ You bet it doesn’t! It knows better. Nothing has happened,
except that another second has gone by in exactly the usual way.
That’s nothing to make a man blue--or a woman either.
I know a man who is so pessimistic that if you make him a present of a
brand-new silver dollar he will turn it over and over trying to see if
he can’t discover that one side of that dollar is darker than the other
side of it. A silver dollar, spang-new from the mint, has no dark side,
but that doesn’t bother this fellow--if that dollar has no dark side he
picks out one side and _calls_ it the dark side, and that’s the
only side of that dollar you can ever get him to look at.
A couple of years ago we had a long and cold and hard winter and there
was a lot of snow. I was going downtown the first warm day that spring,
and the snow had melted considerably, and I met this dark-side fellow
at his gate. Where the snow had melted in his yard the grass was rich
and green, and where the sun was strongest a dandelion had opened.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s a dandelion! That looks good; that looks as if
spring was here at last.’
The dark-side citizen looked at the dandelion and all the joy of living
went out of him in an instant.
‘Yes, yes!’ he said. ‘That’s the way it goes; it will be winter again
before we know it!’
That man would never in this world think of his birthday as a joyous
celebration of the fact that he was lucky to be born. I never asked
him, but I’ll bet he considers his birthdays nothing but advance
warnings of his approaching death. And that’s a fine way to celebrate!
When I lived out in Iowa as a boy, I knew a charming old lady who gave
herself a small birthday party every year. She always had a little
dinner party on that day and invited a few of her dearest friends, and
as my aunt was one of those friends and I was living with my aunt I
was invited too. To me, dear Mrs. Van’s birthday parties were always
a great event. I always looked forward to them eagerly and was glad
she had been born, and one reason was that always, as we left after
dinner, Mrs. Van gave each of us a little parcel of some sort, and in
it was a birthday present.
I cannot now remember what most of the presents she gave me were;
I only remember that one of them was a majolica saucer, shaped and
colored like a pale green lettuce leaf, and it must have cost all of
ten cents. I kept that saucer for years, and it was one of the things I
was fondest of, just as a boy is always fond of a thing he has no use
for and that is especially inappropriate for him.
That majolica saucer, presented to me on her birthday by that cultured
elderly lady, probably said to me, ‘You see! Mrs. Van knows you are
not a mere clodhopper; she knows you appreciate Art. Other folks may
think you can’t appreciate anything but brown molasses taffy and dead
cats and buckwheat cakes and useful things of that sort, but Mrs.
Van knows you can treasure finer and better things, such as genuine
majolica lettuce leaves.’
We can’t tell what effect such seemingly trivial things have on our
lives. Possibly owning that majolica saucer stirred my young heart with
a desire to have a home of my own that I could put majolica saucers in,
thus leading me to want to have a wife, and twins, and other children,
and gas bills, and be a respected citizen with taxes to pay. If it
had not been for that majolica saucer I might have grown up with
no thought of home. I might have rushed away in some fit of bitter
anger at the woodpile, and have become a lone wolf and ended by being
a Mexican bandit. I might have become an outcast, wearing a belt to
keep my pants up, instead of wearing one because suspenders are not
fashionable.
It has always seemed to me that Mrs. Van’s custom of giving presents on
her birthday indicated that she considered her birthday a day on which
to remember that it was good to have been born and to be alive. She was
glad she had been born, and she wanted others to be glad, so she gave
them presents. You would imagine, when you see how some people hate
the coming of their birthdays, that there was some law of nature that
declared that a man must inevitably die on the same day of the year as
that on which he was born--that his birthday was also his deathday. If
that were so, I might have some reason to hang up a bunch of crape and
write for prices on coffins, plain and fancy, as my birthday approached.
If any of you want to think of your birthdays as a sort of subpœna
to prepare to meet your doom, go ahead and do so--I don’t want to. I
don’t even want to think of my birthday as a hint that another year is
gone. I want my birthday celebrated by me as the one strictly personal
festival I have on the calendar.
I’m willing to put on a clean shirt and go out and whoop it up on
Washington’s Birthday, and I’m willing to join in with the rest of the
boys and hurrah on Lincoln’s Birthday, but Washington and Lincoln are
neither of them half as important to me as I am to myself, and when my
birthday comes I want to get a little fun out of it, even if no one
else does.
I don’t want to think of it as a mere memorandum that three hundred and
sixty-five days have passed away during the last fifty-two weeks of
time. I wouldn’t call that much of a birthday. If that was all I wanted
a birthday for, I could use any other day just as well. I can look
sober and say, ‘Well, another year is gone,’ on December 16th or June
10th or on the Fourth of July or October 3d or any other day. A ‘year’
ends every day of the year; a ‘year’ ends at every tick of the clock,
doesn’t it?
One of the saddest cases on record is that of Emmett C. Stocks, late of
Cebada, Iowa. Emmett was born at Cebada, and he had a sister Aurelia
who was born in the same place; but when she was twenty-four she
married a man named Finch and moved to Oregon. Emmett was three years
younger than Aurelia--or so he supposed--and he lived with his Uncle
Peter Stocks and worked in his notion store. He got five dollars per
week at first and paid his Uncle Peter three dollars per week board,
but when Emmett reached his twenty-first birthday his Uncle Peter
did what he had always promised to do and raised Emmett’s pay to ten
dollars per week.
Things went along this way for a few years and then Emmett’s Uncle
Peter died and the notion store gave up its ghost, and Emmett went to
work in the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank in Cebada, and he was so well
fitted to the banking business that in ten years he was president of
the bank, owned nine tenths of the stock, and possessed thirty thousand
dollars’ worth of mortgages on the outside.
A year after having been made president of the bank, Emmett married
Ruth Filsom, whose father owned the Cebada Dairy, and in due time they
had four fine children--two boys and two girls--and Emmett built a
swell house on the lot cater-cornered from the Methodist Church.
The man who told me about Emmett said that all his life Emmett was
the happiest and most contented man ever known in Cebada. He used to
go around town humming a little tune and chewing a couple of cardamom
seeds, picking up first and second mortgages that he found lying around
loose, and people often spoke of him, and said that if ever there was a
man who looked happy and was happy, Emmett Stocks was that man.
Things went on like this until Emmett was sixty-nine years old. On his
sixty-ninth birthday he gave a party and invited all his friends, and
his wife built a dandy birthday cake for the occasion with sixty-nine
little red candles on it and ‘E. S.’ traced out in red peppermints on
the icing.
Just before he cut the cake, Emmett made a little speech. He thanked
those present for the gifts they had brought and said his finest
feelings had been touched by the love and affection shown him, and that
they would have to pardon him if his voice trembled, because when he
thought how greatly blessed he had been he was close to tears. He had
to stop for a moment right there to control himself; but he went on
and said he had the dearest wife and the best children, and that the
Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank was in fine financial condition and paying
thirty-two per cent annually and he had nothing to kick about and a lot
to be glad for. Then he said he was now sixty-nine years old, but he
did not feel it.
He said he knew that seventy years was the time allotted to man on this
earth by the Psalmist, and he would not kick about that--he had had
sixty-nine perfect years; and if the Psalmist’s rule came true in his
case he would still have one glorious year ahead of him, and he would
be satisfied and happy and content. He said he knew he would live
until he was seventy, because he felt like a boy and his liver was in
good condition and he had never had any stomach trouble to speak of.
He was going on to say that he here and now invited one and all to come
to his birthday party a year from then, when Obed Riggs, the assistant
postmaster of Cebada, pushed into the room. He was panting a little,
because he had run all the way from the post-office. The evening mail
had arrived and among it was a package for Emmett, all the way from
Oregon, and Obed guessed rightly that it was a birthday present from
Emmett’s sister Aurelia, and he had hurried to put it in Emmett’s
hands.
When he saw Aurelia’s name and address in the corner of the package
Emmett smiled a happy smile and asked permission to open the package
before he went on with his speech because, he said, this was the
crowning happiness of the occasion--a gift from his beloved sister
Aurelia. So he took the knife with which he had been going to cut the
cake, and cut the cord that bound the package.
‘It’s a book,’ he said. ‘Aurelia knows I like books.’
Then he removed the paper wrapper and looked at the book, and more
tears filled his eyes, because he knew in an instant what the book was.
It was the old Stocks Family Bible. He opened the book and the volume
parted at the place between the Old and New Testaments where the
closely written pages of ‘Family Records’ began with a page of ‘Births.’
Emmett ran his eyes down this page, and then he came to the record of
his own birth, and the smile that had been on his face slowly faded
out. In its place came a look of horror and despair. There could be no
doubt about it, he had to believe his own eyes--he was not sixty-nine
years old, he was seventy.
From that moment Emmett Stocks was a changed man. He closed the Bible
and looked around the room with a woe-begone countenance, and after a
moment he turned and went out and climbed the stairs to his bedroom,
and undressed and got into bed. For six days he lay there speechless,
with the tears streaming down his face, and on the seventh day he died.
Of course, there was all sorts of talk about this in Cebada. Some of
the meaner folks, those who owed Emmett money, said the reason he
sickened and died was because he remembered that his Uncle Peter had
promised to give Emmett that five-dollar raise on Emmett’s twenty-first
birthday and, because Emmett was mistaken in his birthday, the
increased pay had not begun until Emmett was twenty-two, and that thus
Emmett had lost five dollars a week for a solid fifty-two weeks, back
in 1864, and that the thought had been too much for him. But that was
not the real reason. The real reason was that Emmett Stocks had become
so used to feeling as old as his birthdays told him he ought to feel,
that the sudden shock of learning that he was a year older than he had
figured simply killed him. Since I heard about Emmett Stocks, I’ve quit
using my birthdays to tell time by. It’s not safe.
* * * * *
When I was in Paris I attended a birthday party there. It was strictly
a family affair; but the young man who was celebrating was the son
of the lady who owned the _pension_ where I was staying, and
as I had paid part of my board bill that week I was considered one
of the family. I can’t say the affair was very riotous. Members of
the family from near and far sat around the edge of the room on
stiff-backed chairs and nibbled small cakes and sipped thin wine, and
conversed gently in a sedate manner. I did not do much conversation
myself, the only French I knew at that time being ‘low show,’ which
means ‘hot water,’ and somehow that did not seem to work into the
conversation advantageously. No matter how good a man’s intentions are,
or how willing he may be to make an affair a success, he is apt to be
misunderstood if he breaks into the middle of a family talk, uttering
‘hot water’ in a loud voice.
In some ways that birthday party in Paris seemed more like a highly
respectable funeral than we think birthday parties should seem; but
one had only to look at the young man who was the leading gentleman
in the affair to know it was not a funeral. He grinned more than the
corpse usually does, and seemed to be a lot more uncomfortable, but he
certainly enjoyed it all and was proud to be celebrated that way. As a
usual thing, I try to take a prominent part in affairs and to be the
life of the party, telling amusing jokes about Pat and Mike; but this
time I merely sat around and looked intelligent until the affair was
over, and then I came out strong. When every one present kissed the
young man on both cheeks I refrained from kissing him and shook his
hand instead, and this gave the party a sort of international aspect
and made it a great success.
But what I like best about the French annual doings is that when a man
celebrates his birthday there he calls it his ‘fête-day,’ which means
a feast-day or festival-day. And usually it is not his birthday at
all; it is the day in the calendar consecrated to the particular saint
whose name he bears, if any. That certainly takes a lot of sting out of
birthdays and makes them more joyous and care-free, just as if I had
been named Independence Butler and had a right to celebrate myself on
the Fourth of July. A ‘fête-day’ suggests something to celebrate with
some sort of hurrah, a person’s own Christmas or Thanksgiving, as if
everybody ought to be glad I was born. ‘Birthday’ is too apt to suggest
nothing but that the clock has ticked again, that another coupon has
been torn from my seventy-trip book, that another hole has been punched
in my meal-ticket.
I’ll bet you never saw a magazine come out on its fiftieth anniversary
with a black mourning border around the front cover and an editorial
saying, ‘Alas! This magazine is fifty years old now, and just that much
nearer death!’ No, sir! It prints the picture of a lovely young girl on
the cover, and the editorial says, ‘Hurrah, boys! We’re fifty years
old and going strong and we’ll probably live forever.’
* * * * *
The idea that every birthday shortens your life is all nonsense. The
truth is that every birthday is a guarantee that you will live longer
than you ever had any right to think you would. Every birthday you
reach puts your probable deathday further into the future.
When I was twenty-one I went to a young doctor to be examined for life
insurance purposes, and when he had pawed me all over and listened to
my interior clock-work he drew a mighty long face.
‘I’ll pass you,’ he said, ‘but I should not do it. You have a heart.
You may go along until you are about forty, and then your heart will
begin to kick up and you won’t be able to do any more work, and a
couple of years later you’ll be walking along the street some day, and
you’ll stop short with an expression of surprise and immediately enter
the pearly gates.’
Twenty years ago I was examined for insurance again. The doctor this
time was no friend of mine, and I had never seen him before. He pawed
over me and stuck new and improved appliances against me fore and
aft--megaphones and dictaphones and so on. When he was through he
asked me if I had had a good night’s rest the night before. I told
him the truth. I said I had had a regular Hades of a time. I said my
baby daughter was teething and I had walked the floor with her three
quarters of the night and she yelling bloody murder. Then I asked him
if he asked because there was anything serious the matter with me, and
he said there was not. He said the heart action showed I had not rested
well at night lately, but it was nothing important.
A few days ago I was examined again, and once more for life insurance,
and again I did not know the doctor from Adam. In the twenty years that
had passed, a whole new lot of testing appliances have been invented,
and by the time the doctor had them all clamped on me I looked like
a three hundred dollar car decorated with five hundred dollars’
worth of accessories. When the doctor had walked around me a couple
of dozen times, studying the dials and reading the indexes, he gave
his opinion--I was as sound as a nut: heart all right, blood pressure
all right, lungs all right, everything all right. Not a thing the
matter with me. So I’m younger than when I was twenty-one. When I was
twenty-one I was sure to be dead at forty-four; now I’m fifty-five and
if my great-grandchildren ever want to get rid of me they will probably
have to use an axe on me sometime along about 1974.
The insurance companies, to whom such things mean success or failure,
have been collecting statistics and compiling tables for many long
years, and they base their business on those charts and tables. All
those charts prove that, at least until you are ninety-five years old,
you should celebrate every birthday with joy.
Suppose, for a moment, you were born in 1855. Dr. Louis I. Dublin,
a New York insurance statistician, says that the first ‘Expectation
of Life’ table of any value, in the United States, was compiled in
Massachusetts in 1855. This set the expectation of life at forty years.
In other words, the average baby born in 1855 had a right to expect to
live to be forty. In 1910 the figure had increased to fifty-one years.
In 1920 it was over fifty-five years, and Dr. Dublin believed that
campaigns to reduce the worst diseases, together with improved sanitary
conditions and better standards of living, might add ten years to
that. In 1924, in his report to Congress, Surgeon-General Cumming, of
the Public Health Service, said fifty-six years was now the average
span of life in America, and contrasted it with the sixteenth century
when the average life was between eighteen and twenty years. So, you
see, every time you celebrate your birthday you can also celebrate the
improved sanitary conditions and new conquests of disease that mean you
should live longer than you thought you would when you celebrated your
birthday a year ago.
But this is not all. There is another reason why you should celebrate
your birthday with gladness if continuing life is what interests you.
There is a table called ‘American Experience Table of (Insured)
Mortality,’ that represents the facts and figures that have been dug
out through many years. If you look at this table you’ll see that,
when ten thousand boys reach the age of ten years, they have a right
to look forward to an average future life of (about) forty-nine years.
Suppose you are that boy and you are ten years old, you have a right
to say, ‘Well, the chances are, taking the average, that I’ll live to
be fifty-nine.’ So there’s no use worrying until you are fifty-eight,
is there? But, if, when you reach the age of fifty-eight, you look at
the table again you’ll see that the ‘average future life in years’ for
a man aged fifty-eight is (about) fifteen years. So the average chance
is that you are _not_ going to die at fifty-nine, after all; the
average chance is that you are going to live to be seventy-three.
So there is no need to take stock again until you are seventy-two,
and when you are seventy-two and look at the table you find that
the ‘average future life in years’ of a man seventy-two years old
is (about) seven and one half years, and you have a fair right to
expect to live to be seventy-nine and one half. And if you consult the
table when you are seventy-nine you’ll see you have an average chance
of living four and three fourths years longer, which will make you
eighty-four years and three months old. And when you are eighty-four
the table says you still have an average expectation of living three
years longer. That ought to be almost long enough for anybody, I should
think, but even when you reach the rather mature age of eighty-seven,
there’s no need of celebrating your birthday with a grouch, because the
table gives the eighty-seven-year-old boys an average of two and one
sixth years more.
Every time you reach a new birthday you shove your average expectation
of life further into the future. At nineteen you were due to be dead
when you were fifty-nine, and at eighty-seven you are due to live two
and one sixth years more!
That’s how Methuselah, the son of Enoch, did it--every time his
birthday came around he invited the neighbors in and gave three hearty
cheers. And he lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years old, and
he wouldn’t have died then except that it got to be too much trouble to
serve ice-cream and cake to all his great-great-great-grandchildren on
his birthdays.
You can put this another way if you want to. The table would run
something like this:
At 10 you have about 85 chances out of 10,000 of living to be 90.
At 30 you have about 99 chances out of 10,000 of living to be 90.
At 50 you have about 121 chances out of 10,000 of living to be 90.
At 70 you have about 214 chances out of 10,000 of living to be 90.
At 89 you have about 6041 chances out of 10,000 of living to be 90.
I don’t claim that the above figures are absolutely accurate, but they
are accurate enough. They show that every time you have a birthday your
chances of living to a fine old age get better instead of worse. I
think that is a good reason for welcoming our birthdays with glee.
When I reached my fiftieth birthday I absolutely stopped worrying about
dying before I was forty-five years old. And I stopped worrying about
dying before I’m ninety, too. How can I tell? Maybe I’m the man Nature
has picked out to beat Methuselah’s record and pile up one thousand
years. The only thing about that that worries me is my hair; I can see
now that my hair is never going to last that long. Unless I grow a
second crop.
* * * * *
Last year when my boy’s dog had a birthday, we had a birthday cake for
him, with red candles on it. I am willing to swear before any notary in
the United States that he did not look at it sadly and sigh and say,
‘Yes, yes! Another year gone! A few more sad and doleful years and it
will be all over with me and I’ll trouble you no more.’ No, sir! He
pitched right in and ate the cake with the utmost joy. Then he ate the
candles.
Perhaps it was because he is a fox terrier and has a naturally
optimistic and scrappy disposition, but I doubt it. What I think is
that when we wished him a happy birthday he did not have the slightest
notion what we were talking about. Time and birthdays and calendars and
clocks and minutes and such things don’t mean anything to him; he does
not live by the year, he lives by the number of gray cats he can chase
up trees. When you hand him a birthday cake, he doesn’t consider it a
warning of approaching dissolution; he considers it joy-food and treats
it as such.
How many people do you know who began mourning their birthdays years
and years ago and are still kicking around? Dozens probably.
If birthdays mean anything at all, they mean that the good old clock
is still ticking along the same as usual, and is likely to continue to
do so. The world has never been improved much by the men who get up in
meeting and read reports beginning, ‘I am sorry to report that the year
just closed--’ The fellows who push things along are those who begin
with ‘I am glad to announce that the year just beginning--’
When it comes to birthday presents, it is all right to accept with
thanks what the other fellow gives you, whether it is a silver-plated
ash-receiver or a green necktie; and it is all right, if you wish, to
celebrate the day by handing out to your friends majolica saucers that
look like lettuce leaves; but the best birthday gift possible is to
hand yourself every birthday morning three hundred and sixty-five new
and unused days, any one of which may turn out to be the best day you
ever had in your life.
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