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 subpœna 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.