Read Ebook: Many happy returns of the day! by Butler Ellis Parker

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 77 lines and 9631 words, and 2 pages

Transcriber's Notes

Images are indicated as

MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY!

ELLIS PARKER BUTLER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE ? MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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.

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 '.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.

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 subpoena 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.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet