Butler Ellis Parker
How It Feels to Be Fifty
I took out an old photograph of mine the other day – one I had taken away back in 1887, when I was eighteen – and I remembered how full of cares and worries I was at that time. I used to stay awake night after night and worry over getting married, for instance. I used to wonder how I could ever get up enough courage to go up to a girl and ask her to marry me.
That awful necessity loomed up before me and filled me with woe and agony, gave me cold chills and hot flushes, and made me absolutely miserable for years.
I remember that when I was about twenty I saw an item in a newspaper, away inside somewheres and tucked in a corner. It said statistics showed that bashful men were usually the first to marry. That item was a wonderful source of relief to me. I cut it out and carried it in my pocket, and whenever I felt the cold chill of fear come over me and I began to sweat at the thought that some day I must ask a girl to marry me, I got out that clipping and read it, and tried to brace up and be brave. To-day I have a wife and four children and that worry is gone.
My hair was another great worry in those days. My father is quite bald, and he had become bald when he was a very young man; when he was twenty-one or twenty-two, I believe.
I don't know why a young man should think a heavy head of hair is such an imperative necessity, when hats are so cheap, but I was haunted by a dire fear that I might grow bald while still young. I was in continual distress lest the Butler baldness might be hereditary. I had just one great hope – that at least some of my hair might stay on my head until I was married, anyway.
When I became engaged, this hair-fear took the place of the afraid-to-propose fear. It was with me night and day. It was a keen, personal agony. The thought that I might have to walk up the church aisle to the music of the wedding march, with my bald head shining like a white watermelon, almost made me collapse with shame. And the worst of it was that my hair did begin to come out by handfuls. I shed hair like a cat in the springtime. Those were awful days! I saw myself doomed to a life of hairless disgrace and degradation.
At fifty I have more hair than a man of that age is expected to have; and I don't care a continental whether it stays or goes. It has worn well. If it goes to-morrow I can say, "No matter; it was a good crop while it lasted, and it lasted well." If I become absolutely bald it will be a good publicity feature, like the late Bill Nye's baldness. I should worry!
At fifty the few pains and aches I have are, so to speak, standardized. They are old friends; if they went away I should miss them. I should not be myself without them.
There is one I am especially fond of, because I have had it so long. It resides in my tummy. I have had that pain so many years that I have, so to speak, built my character around it, as an oyster builds the beautiful, lustrous pearl around the intruding grain of sand.
Forty years ago I used to howl when that pain came. I used to lie across a chair, or a log, or a hummock of ground, and howl when it made remarks. Twenty years ago, when that pain gripped me I used to imagine death was about to end my promising career. To-day I treat it like an old friend when it makes itself felt. It can't fool me. I know its tricks and its manners. I say "'Ullo! 'Ullo! 'Ere you are again, are you? Welcome 'ome, old top! Sorry I can't give you more attention, but I 've got such a lot to do; just 'ang around until you get ready to go, old sport, and make yourself comfortable."
At fifty my general health is better than it ever was. I have shaken off a bilious headache that was the curse of my youthful days. Proper eyeglasses have corrected an astigmatism that gave me other headaches twenty years ago. With the same glasses I can see as well now as I ever did. My appetite is as good as it ever was. I enjoy everything in life more than I ever did. I am more sure of myself. I know what I can do, and I am not afraid to do it.
