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.