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!