By Lida Prypchan
Don Ernesto was turning eighty. With the philosophical bent of mind that was typical of him, he asked himself, just as he had forty years before, what conclusions he had drawn from life. Well, nothing extraordinary… he just wondered what he would do if he were born all over again. The advantage of turning eighty is that you begin to realize how life should really be lived and the things that are really worthwhile: watching the eight o’clock show on Monday nights; seeing your kids grow up; having a few drinks and a pleasant chat with a friend; shedding as few tears as need be; taking a stroll in the rain; letting life flow on as it will, without going out of one’s way to make things happen; experiencing love with equanimity (even if it hurt), and loneliness too, as the highest expression of human intelligence and spiritual capacity.
“But just eighty years?” thought Don Ernesto, “That’s too short a time to live! Our lives should really be planned to last eight hundred years. The first hundred should be totally dedicated to playing games: a hundred years to play tag and shoot marbles, or toy with a yo-yo or top; a hundred years to ask questions that grown-ups of five hundred can’t answer; a hundred years to learn how to multiply and divide and understand the absurdity of history; a hundred years to bait all those teachers who take pleasure in discomfiting their students. At two hundred, we’d begin high school and see if we can learn (or at least halfway understand) trigonometry with all its problems and senseless lines and angles, and chemistry with all those carbons, hydrogen’s and nitrogens (nobody ever really knows where the devil they came from!) and the composition of air, when in the end all we really need to know about it is that we have to breathe it. If we went to high school when we were two hundred, we’d have dropped all sorts of unnecessary subjects from the curriculum long before. It’s only logical: with our hurried way of life, who would have time to study the past to improve the present?
When we reached three hundred, we’d take a well-earned vacation for a hundred years. One hundred years to think about what career we were going to study, with no pressure from our family, state or local government, or the neighbors! We’d use these hundred years to explore love – and all the other things which need a balanced judgment. At four hundred, we’d need to get involved in national politics to learn cynicism – and how to disregard promises, or see through fairy tales. We could use this hundred years to train in how to lie and be deceitful or hypocritical with just about anyone we wanted; we’d learn how to while away our time with public causes, force a smile, and take advantage of our position to treat people unjustly. When we were five hundred, we’d get married to a baby-producing machine who gets up at six in the morning to make breakfast, starts cooking at eleven, fixes the potatoes at six in the evening (peeled with even less enthusiasm than the day before) and then waits till eight P.M. for the lucky man to come home and eat in two minutes what took an hour and a half to prepare. After six hundred years, menopause and andropause would set in. The lucky woman would find out how to avoid using her brain by spending her time doing embroidery, sewing drapes for the living room, setting the dining room table, or perhaps even wall-papering every room in the house. The lucky man could take up fishing if he’s a depressive, or chase schoolgirls if he’s a rogue. Before they were seven hundred years old the lucky pair would already have bought a couple of rocking chairs and could spend the last hundred years telling stories to each other and their grandchildren.”
And when he turned eight hundred, Don Ernesto would say to us: “By the time you’re my age you begin to figure out how life should really be lived and what the four or five things are that really matters.”
