By Tony Deyal
Birthdays are good for your health. Studies show that people with more birthdays live longer. If you don’t want to, there are two ways of keeping from getting old- lie about your age, which I don’t do, and drive while drinking, which I won’t do. The hard part is that I had to reach 79 before people, including my wife and children, tell me that I look so young for my age. I’m not like the elderly couple who got married.
The first night, the husband reached out, took his wife’s hand, and fell asleep. The second night, the same thing. Again the same thing on the third night. The wife looked at him and complained, “What are you? Some kind of sex maniac? Three nights in a row? You mad or what?” I am more like the old man who saw a small boy crying. He asked the boy, “What’s worrying you so much young man?” The boy replied, “Sir, I’m crying because I can’t do what the big boys do.” So the old man sat down and he cried too.
Perhaps he could have gone to the doctor like the old man who said: “Doc, my sex drive is too high. I want it lowered.” The doctor couldn’t believe what the man was saying, “You’re 79 and you want your sex drive lowered?” “That’s right,” said the old man, pointing to his head, “It’s all up here. I want it lowered.” In my case it is low but not far enough. My back goes out more than I do. and my ears are hairier than my head which is empty outside but, fortunately, not inside as yet.
Steven Wright, the comedian, was very worried. He said: “When I turned two I was really anxious because I’d doubled my age in a year.” He added: “I was worried because I believed that if this keeps up, by the time I’m six, I’ll be ninety!” Fortunately for me, he was not right but still not too far off. Even at 79, you know you’re getting older when the candles cost more than the cake.
However, it is when you buy both at that age that the real trouble and cost hit you because you have to get the Fire Brigade to stand by and the police just in case. The only reason to do it is that, as Charles Shultz, the creator of the cartoon “Peanut” said: “Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” You also pick up some hope and despair at the same time. At 79, the founding Father of the US, Benjamin Franklin, invented bifocal eyeglasses. At the same age, I wear trifocals. Christopher Wren, the British architect, completed the spectacular St Paul’s Cathedral.in London. George Cayley engineered the first manned heavier-than-air flight.
The only flights I was involved in were once when the police nearly caught me for playing cards for money under the street light and I had to hide in a lady’s house. She made me sit down at her table, gave me a cup of tea and a piece of bread and said: “They can’t lock you up because you have been here for breakfast for almost an hour.”
The other was when the police, this time with thick whips tried to arrest all of us who were betting on a card game in the forest. An old lady with a stick jumped the six-foot river and got away. I got my feet wet but not enough to stop me from running through the forest, crossing the main road without noticing it, and ending up hiding in a cane field. What I did was nowhere close to the artist, Marc Chagall, who unveiled his murals at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House, Giuseppe Verdi composed his opera “Falstaff”, and Cornelius Vanderbilt constructed the Grand Central Terminal in New York.
What I can boast of are the many friends, almost 300, who in less than two days not only wished me a happy birthday but included great memories and even good jokes. One I had included in a column many years ago was about my getting heartburn every time I ate birthday cake and my doctor recommended, “Next time take out the candle.”
Even when I take out not just the candle but the cake, I am still stuck and struck with the seven ages of man- spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills. I no longer drink to the grills, pretend I’m helping my father in his shop and grabbing some money from the tills, and then, when he chased me with the belt, run up the hills. Now I can’t even run down a hill. But I can roll.
In that sense, boys will be boys and so will a lot of old men, including me. It is why I think of the English author and philosopher, G.K. Chesterton who created the fictional Roman Catholic priest and amateur detective, Father Brown, one of my favourite books and TV shows. He had two quotes on birthdays and again. He said: “The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.” I’m all for that unless my family or friends get me really angry. The second is; “The birthday is a dogma no normal men deny, a formula of fundamental confession; it thanks Heaven by implication for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of life.”
In that sense, unless we kick the bucket, or it kicks us, none of us can help getting older but we don’t have to get OLD. For me, having a birthday is a lot better than not having any. Or, as one friend told me, old age for a man is when he has been out with a girl all night and the only thing that comes is daylight. In my case, I’m more like a dog chasing a car. Even if I catch it, I can’t drive it. Perhaps, deep down, I envy the old man in this story.
A woman, well into her sixties, went to the doctor complaining of nausea, exhaustion, and occasional cramps. After a thorough examination, the doctor sent her to the hospital for a battery of tests, and finally confronted her with the results.
“Mrs Barber,” he said: “Medically impossible though it seems at your age, there’s no doubt that you’re pregnant.” “Impossible,” she screamed and fainted. When she revived, she went straight to the phone, dialed her eighty-two-year-old husband, and shouted: “You’ve made me pregnant you dirty old man.” There was a long pause at the other end of the line, and then her husband asked, “And to whom am I speaking?”
*Tony Deyal was last seen advising his younger friends and children, “ You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.”
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