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.’