Ellis Parker Butler

“ 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. ”

“ No matter how good a man’s intentions are, or how willing he may be to make an affair a success, he is apt to be misunderstood if he breaks into the middle of a family talk, uttering ‘hot water’ in a loud voice.
[Pg 33]
In some ways that birthday party in Paris seemed more like a highly respectable funeral than we think birthday parties should seem; but one had only to look at the young man who was the leading gentleman in the affair to know it was not a funeral. ”

“ Being a good-natured man—except in the bosom of my family—I have to write a line or two to those people and say, ‘Thanks for your kind birthday wishes, you have touched my heart’; but what I would like to write is, ‘Go on! You’ll probably be dead twenty years before I am; go weep on your own shoulder.’ I can’t concede that I’m crazy to be the sort of man who looks up from his tulip-planting and gazes at his neighbor and draws a long face and sighs, and says, ‘Yes, yes! ”

“ Every time you reach a new birthday you shove your average expectation of life further into the future. At nineteen you were due to be dead when you were fifty-nine, and at eighty-seven you are due to live two and one sixth years more! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 18] 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 20] 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 49] 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. ”

“ There is one thing every person has. He may not own a dog or an automobile or a wooden leg, but he has a birthday of his own. Even women have them; they had them before they got the vote.
In a country the size of this, with something like one hundred and ten million inhabitants and only three hundred and sixty-six days in the biggest year now in use, three hundred thousand or more people have birthdays every day. ”

“ December has always been a favorite birthday month in our family. My birthday arrives a few days after I have the last tulip bulbs in the ground, and my father’s is six days later, and my boy’s dog’s birthday is two days after that. ”

“ The insurance companies, to whom such things mean success or failure, [Pg 40] have been collecting statistics and compiling tables for many long years, and they base their business on those charts and tables. All those charts prove that, at least until you are ninety-five years old, you should celebrate every birthday with joy.
Suppose, for a moment, you were born in 1855. Dr. Louis I. Dublin, a New York insurance statistician, says that the first ‘Expectation of Life’ table of any value, in the United States, was compiled in Massachusetts in 1855. ”

“ The real reason was that Emmett Stocks had become so used to feeling as old as his birthdays told him he ought to feel, that the sudden shock of learning that he was a year older than he had figured simply killed him. Since I heard about Emmett Stocks, I’ve quit using my birthdays to tell time by. It’s not safe.
When I was in Paris I attended a birthday party there. ”

“ He was going on to say that he here and now invited one and all to come to his birthday party a year from then, when Obed Riggs, the assistant postmaster of Cebada, pushed into the room. He was panting a little, because he had run all the way from the post-office. The evening mail had arrived and among it was a package for Emmett, all the way from Oregon, and Obed guessed rightly that it was a birthday present from Emmett’s sister Aurelia, and he had hurried to put it in Emmett’s hands. ”

“ I wouldn’t call that much of a birthday. If that was all I wanted [Pg 22] 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course, there was all sorts of talk about this in Cebada. Some of the meaner folks, those who owed Emmett money, said the reason he sickened and died was because he remembered that his Uncle Peter had promised to give Emmett that five-dollar raise on Emmett’s twenty-first birthday and, because Emmett was mistaken in his birthday, the increased pay had not begun until Emmett was twenty-two, and that thus Emmett had lost five dollars a week for a solid fifty-two weeks, back [Pg 31] in 1864, and that the thought had been too much for him. ”

“ 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, [Pg 11] 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 ”

“ 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, [Pg 15] 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 ”