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

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Ebook has 77 lines and 9631 words, and 2 pages

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.

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 'f?te-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 'f?te-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.

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.

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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