“I’d like you to explain how you’ve kept so young-looking and feeling after all these years.”
“That’s easy. I’m just following the new policy of you folks down below and carrying it out to its logical extreme. The modern idea is to regard age as merely a state of mind. Simply refuse to grow old and you’ll find it’s easy enough to stay young. Is your hair getting gray? Never say dye. Is your hair falling out? Get it bobbed. Don’t try camouflaging your face, but keep young inside. Joshua has the right dope: let’s have some lifetime saving. Half a century ago a man was old at forty and a woman put on a cap and sat in the chimney corner when she turned thirty. A girl was an old maid at twenty-five. Today you think there’s something wrong with a grandmother who can’t jazz and nobody knows the meaning of ‘declining years.’ And nobody is too old to decline a cigarette or a dance. They used to say a man ought to retire at seventy. Now it’s hard to get him to retire at midnight, if there’s a good show left in town. Folks are just beginning to enjoy life at sixty.
“All I’ve done is to follow you folk’s example and refuse to be old at nine hundred and sixty-nine. If I can do it, everybody can. How does this jibe with my advice not to try to live to be a hundred, you may ask. That’s perfectly consistent. The way to live long is not to bother about it. I wouldn’t have been five hundred if I’d tried to keep up with the advice of all the insurance experts. I speak from experience. Take the ‘no breakfast’ cranks, for instance. I went without breakfast for one hundred and twenty-five years and I didn’t know what was the matter with me. Then I tried taking a couple of pounds of beefsteak and half a dozen baked potatoes before breakfast every morning, and I felt like a new man. Then, once at the beginning of a century—I forget which one—Mrs. M. got me to swear off on tobacco for a hundred years. We used to make our so-called good resolutions at the start of a century, not of a year, the way you do. The first hundred years may be the hardest, she said, but ‘see how much better you’ll feel.’ Well, I stuck it out about sixty years, and then the whole family came around and besought me on bended knee to go back to hitting the pipe. They said life in our once happy home was getting to resemble a bear garden or a peace conference or a free-for-all prize fight. Better to smoke than to fume. And so I got out the old pipe and smoked up for another six hundred years.
“I wish I’d kept a card index of all the health fads I’ve seen come and go. Once the vegetarians had their inning. Somebody said the secret of health was to eat nothing but onions. It would have been pretty hard to keep the secret. Then we were told to eat only fruit. And once all the cranks decided on an exclusive diet of nuts—sort of cannibalistic when you come to think of it. One winter they said we’d all be healthier with the minimum of underwear—the short and simple flannels of the poor. Another rule for living long was to almost freeze yourself every morning taking a cold bath—I remember one winter I qualified for a zero medal. I ate baled hay and fried sawdust and all sorts of breakfast foods for two or three centuries, under the impression that they were the elixirs of eternal youth, and then one day I found I was getting so weak and wobbly on my pins I cut ’em all out and went back to a good dose of real food, three times a day, to be taken at mealtime. I quit the fads and fancies, ate everything that came my way and let ’em fight it out among themselves. And I broke the world’s record for dodging the undertaker.
“But, as I remarked before, I can’t say I’d advise anybody to try to be even a single centenarian, to say nothing of scoring nine. Think of paying for nine hundred birthday presents your wife gave you, not to mention several thousand contributed by the children and grandchildren and other descendants. Why, one birthday I got ninety-three pairs of slippers, most of ’em, of course, a size too small—must have thought I was a centipede. Then there’s a good deal of competition among centenarians, and that leads to jealousy and hard feelings. For instance, I’d always predicted the weather by my rheumatiz (although I could never tell when there was going to be a storm at home). I got quite a reputation by it. And then an upstart centenarian over at Ararat, a young fellow only about three hundred years old, claimed it always rained when his corns hurt him—or the other way round—and took away about half my visitors. He boasted that he had a set of infallible corns, and every morning he’d get out a bulletin such as ‘Fair and warmer,’ or ‘Cold weather with snow.’ A regular fakir, he was. Honest folk just considered him one of those excess prophets. But he seemed to guess right about fifty per cent of the time, and when he was wrong people gave him credit for his good intentions. His whole stock in trade was his corns. Any good chiropodist could have reduced him to bankruptcy in five minutes. But he put up a bluff and got away with it and made folks think he was the real Oldest Inhabitant.”
“One more question, Mr. Methuselah: how do you account for the fact that folks lived so much longer in your time than they do nowadays?”
“Well, there were no automobiles and telephones and germ theories, and revenue officers and apartment houses and phonographs and piano-players and rolled hose and alarm clocks and table d’hôte dinners, for one thing, and for another, we didn’t try to compress five hundred years of living into a fifty years’ existence. We didn’t cover any more distance over the highway of life than you moderns do, but we took more time to do it in. We walked instead of ran, and picked flowers along the wayside and paused now and then to admire the scenery. And rich or poor, young or old, we got out of life exactly what you do—a living. And now I must ask you to excuse me. I promised to play nine holes with Noah before luncheon. How would you like to carry my golf sticks?”
I respectfully declined, pleading a previous engagement. I have played many rôles in my time, as a reporter, but I felt I must draw the line at caddying for Methuselah.