VIIIMETHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS
It’s odd how often in interviewing the old-timers and ancient shades one’s preconceived ideas get a jolt. In my mind’s eye I had a vision of Methuselah, for instance, as an antediluvian figure with a Santa Claus beard and a general air of decrepitude. The door was opened in response to my ring by a smartly dressed, smooth-shaven individual, who certainly looked as if the burden of age sat lightly upon his shoulders.
“I should like to see Mr. Methuselah,” I said. “That is, if he is able to see callers today. If he’s having his nap, or not feeling very spry this morning, I can come again.”
“Come again? I guess not. You see me right now. I was going over to the Olympus Club to play a round of golf, but I’ll be glad to give you half an hour. Walk right in. What can I do for you?”
“My city editor wanted an interview on how to attain long life, but I must have got hold of the wrong Mr. Methuselah. I want the one wholived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, the world’s champion oldest inhabitant. Surely you’re not—”
“I’ll say I am. I’m the only original, the guaranteed nine-times-centenarian and then some. I know what you expected to see: an old fossil with snowy whiskers and numerous wrinkles, walking with a couple of canes and dressed in a single garment like an old-fashioned nightshirt. You were prepared to have me give my reminiscences, to wheeze out, between painful breaths, that the old days were far better than anything we have now, to roast the younger generation, and wind up by attributing my longevity to abstaining from booze and the use of tobacco in any form. You were all ready to put down that I can read fine print without glasses and can remember events of nine hundred and fifty years ago as if they happened only yesterday. Oh, I know you newspaper fellows and I’ve read so many interviews with centenarians I could write one myself with my eyes shut. My advice to anybody who wants to live to be a hundred, to say nothing of nine hundred and sixty-nine, is, ‘Don’t.’ And as for reminiscences, my motto is, ‘Forget it.’ I haven’t any very happy recollections of my long-drawn-out stay on earth. Existence ispleasant, but it is possible to have entirely too much of a good thing.
“Take our married life, for instance. At the start everybody said it was a regular love story. But even a love story that stretches out into a serial of over nine hundred chapters gets a trifle monotonous. You’ve never heard of Mrs. M. She wouldn’t tell her age even to get her name into the Bible. I remember when they first started taking the census. The census taker came to our house and camped out three years. Couldn’t get all the facts of our family any other way. And we had to board him all that time. Well, his wife’s sister belonged to the Daughters of Eve Foreign Missionary Society, the same one my wife did, and Mrs. M. said she just knew that if she gave her age, why, that mean old thing would know it within half an hour, and it would be all around town before the day was over. And she just wouldn’t give it. I gave him all the dope about the other members of the family, my great-great-great-etc.-grandchildren and the close relations on my wife’s side who’d been living with us for three hundred and fifty years (close was no name for it), but I balked when it came to the question of Mrs. M.’s age. The fact was, she was only about four hundred and twenty-five, or thereabouts, at the time, but you know how womenare—so blamed sensitive about something that men are proud of—and so I told him to go and get the information from headquarters.
“Well, it happened to be a bad combination that day. It was wash-day, and the cook had just left, after being with us for a hundred and eighty years, and quite a number of the children had the measles and the whooping cough and one thing another, and Mrs. M. happened to have a mop in her hand at the time, and—But here I am reminiscing away and I said I wouldn’t. Let’s get back to business. What did you want me to talk about?”
“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 anold 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 oneday 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 getout 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.