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Robert W Service - My Centenarian
Work rating: Medium

A hundred years is a lot of living
I`ve often thought; and I`ll know, maybe,
Some day if the gods are good in giving,
And grant me to turn the century.
Yet in all my eighty years of being
I`ve never known but one ancient man
Who actively feeling, hearing, seeing,
Survived beyond the hundred span.

Thinking? No, I don`t guess he pondered;
He had the brains of a tiny tot,
And in his mind he so often wandered,
I doubted him capable of thought.
He hadn`t much to think of anyway,
There in the village of his birth,
Painfully poor in a pinching penny-way,
And grimed with the soiling of Mother Earth.

Then one day motoring past his cottage,
The hovel in which he had been born,
I saw him supping a mess of pottage,
on the sill door, so fail forlorn.
Thinks I: I`ll give him a joy that`s thrilling,
A spin in my open Cadillac;
And so I asked him, and he was willing,
And I installed him there in the back.

When I put the big bus through its paces,
A hundred miles an hour or more;
And he clutched at me with queer grimaces,
(He`s never been in a car before.)
The motor roared and the road was level,
The old chap laughed like an impish boy,
And as I drove like the very devil,
Darn him! he peed his pants with joy.

And so I crowned his long existence
By showing him how our modern speed
Easily can annihilate distance,
And answer to all our modern need.
And I went on my way but little caring,
Until I heard to mild dismay,
His drive had thrilled him beyond all bearing . . .
The poor old devil! - He died next day.
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