Part 2

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.