My 2005th birthday is going well

By Stephen Pate, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, June 15, 2009

My 2005th Birthday is going well thank you.

I’m part Jewish so we start the day when the sun goes down and keep it up until the next afternoon. So my birthday is June 14th and 15th. That’s odd but being 2005 years old is odder.

The birthday party started last night at sundown about 5 PM or 4:30 in Newfoundland. We had lobster, potato shlishkas along with liberal amounts of Keith’s Ale. We ate carrot cake for my diet.

If I was an Orthodox Jew, the lobster would have been gefelta-fish but hey this Prince Edward Island. When in Rome, eat like a Roman.

I know, you’re going to say or even write with “You can’t be 2005 years old!”  Save your breath and you might get to be 2000 years old yourself.

It’s tiresome having to defend your age. I tried lying about it.

“How old are you?” people ask at parties or in the super market.

“Twenty”

“No you’re not!”

I tried a few others. “OK, I’m 65. Can I get a discount?”

“You don’t look a day over 46.”

“OK, I’m 46 then.”

“You’re not telling the truth. Now how old are you?”

See what I mean. Any age is the wrong age. I look too old for this age and too young for that. I’ve decided this year to just tell the truth. I’m 2005 years old.

I can’t help it if I was lucky enough to be born in 4. It was a good year in the Middle East. We were living in the land of milk and honey and it was warm.

My parents lived in Nazareth where Jesus hung out. He was older than me in Yeshiva so I only saw him at recess.

When I was six or seven and Jesus was twelve, we almost made a trip to Jerusalem together to the temple. It wasn’t quite a Boy Scouts camp-out but it was a trip.

Bad luck for me my father, a goat herder, kept me home to look after the goats. That meant milking those tiny goat tits. Take it from me, it was a pain.

I hated goats’ milk, my father and herding but what can you do. To this day, I refuse to drink milk unless it is diluted with 70 year old Scotch. It’s for my stomach. Too many matzoh balls the doctor said.

Doctors, don’t get me started. 2000 years I live in great health. No bubonic plague and no athlete’s foot since I refuse to run anywhere. Boom out of nowhere I get post polio a few years back. I went to see the doctor.

“Hey Doc, what’s with this post polio? Some days in the morning I feel like 1025 years old. That was one of my better years: wow was she hot. Other days I feel like a 74 year old man.”

“You’re lucky you waited for them to invent power wheelchairs,” said the doctor. “A few hundred years ago and they would have put you on the ice flow.”

I’m not Jewish anymore. I became an Acadian. It was very unhealthy to be a Jew in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. You know that movie El Cid with Charlton Heston. Good movie but Heston is such a liar. That Cid guy was a terrorist and burned Jews at the stake. I’d seen that ending already.

I was between wives then so I high tailed it across the Pyrenees to France where I took up with a dark haired Catholic girl. Her parents knew right away I wasn’t RC. I didn’t genuflect fast enough when the little bells rang during mass. I blamed it on arthritis. They let me stay. I think they could smell the goat herder. I married that Catholic girl and had two fine boys but she died from the plague and I moved on.

Up north I fell in love with a blond Huguenot girl and started going to the First Baptist Church in Normandy, near the Dutch border. She was a beauty with blue eyes and those golden tresses. Then someone yelled “Jew” in the market one day and I knew the jig was up.

I took the first boat out the harbour and ended up in Port Royal, New France. The rest is standard Acadian folklore – pushed around by the English, hid in the woods with a Micmac girl, had a family, yada yada.

That is the one and only benefit of being 2005 years old. I have known a lot of women. I live for that. In all my years, I never strayed from one girl to the other. A faithful husband, my rule was one year of mourning after the funeral before even looking at another girl. I never did too much looking anyway. Women are attracted to me like flies to honey.

Things are different now. Women are divorcing men.  I’ve been divorced once and another is coming soon. What’s with that? In the old days, you fell in love, had a family and she would die. Now they take the house and half your bank account.

I don’t think I’ll be able to afford to live much longer at the rate things are going. However, I do love the women so no fool like an old fool.

A few years ago, Hannah made me a birthday card. It said

“Happy 2003 Birthday.“

On the inside she wrote

“I can’t believe you’re not dead.“

I thank you for all your birthday greetings. I especially appreciate the wish “and many more to come.”

Postscript – I’m not the only 2000 year old man. The comedian Mel Brooks is 2048 this year. He wrote a bunch of books about it and beat me to the market. All I can say is he looks his age and I don’t.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License – Stephen Pate