I stopped making New Year’s resolutions a long time ago, when I realized that they were all doomed to failure.
I never lost all that weight I resolved to lose.
I never went to a Chicago Cubs World Series game.
Most importantly, I never stopped drinking once I realized that Irish whiskey made all those other problems vanish.
So instead of making doomed resolutions, I long ago decided to use New Year’s Eve to assess the status of the one resolution I have succeeded in keeping — the resolution to live forever.
And this year’s assessment is: So far, so good!
I realize I’m not the first dude who decided he wanted to dodge the whole dying deal. A lot of folks have tried their hand at immortality but they have fallen short – probably because they forgot to check their progress every New Year’s Eve.
Jeanne Calment of France made a good run of it until she died at 122 years old as the oldest recorded human being in history. And she wasn’t just staying alive, she was living! She was smart enough to keep hitting the port wine and chocolate right up to the end, but it was probably her resolution to give up the cigarettes at 117 that did her in.
I’ve got a ways to go before I pass Ms. Calment in the geezer department, but I’ll get there, because I’m vigilant enough to check every New Years. And there are a few other oldies I’ve got to set my sights on.
For example, the oldest orange roughy lived to be 149 years old. I’ve had filets at Long John Silver’s that were probably nearly as old, but at almost a century and a half, that’s one tough roughy, you must admit.
And then there’s the deep-sea tube worm, which has made it to 170. And the red sea urchin, which has clocked 200. Or the bowhead whale found with a 130-year-old harpoon point embedded inside it.
But the champion of them all is Ming the mollusk, an ocean quohog who lived to be 507 years old on a seabed near Iceland. That age has been confirmed by British researchers who counted his growth rings — which was probably the same method used to verify Ms. Calment’s age. After all, how much can you trust the word of a wine-sotted French woman grumpy from having just quit a century-long nicotine habit?
It is doubtful that Ming the mollusk ever smoked, so he never had to face the fatal risk of resolving to stub out his habit. In fact, he seemed to be doing just fine until he fell into the hands of longevity researchers who wanted to know exactly how long a curmudgeonly quohog can keep on keepin’ on.
After a preliminary study, they guessed that he might be 405 years old, which would make him the longest living creature on record. But the only way to know for sure was to open him up and take a look inside. The only problem was that it would kill him to pop him open.
What a dilemma!
And so they did the only thing that any logical researcher into longevity would do. They ended his longevity by cracking him open and having a peek inside to count growth rings. When they did, they found that their newly-croaked Icelandic quohog had bided his time for 507 years before they came along.
As I said, these longevity researchers were British, apparently a race of people whose respect for things long-living is surpassed only by their reverence for things long-dead, like kings and queens, and now quohogs. They’re probably hard at work right now, trying to calculate how many wives Henry VIII would have beheaded if he had lived as long as Ming.
Had these researchers been Americans, they would surely have considered a battery of other tests to determine Ming’s dotage. They could have put a smart phone in front of him to see if he knew how to send a tweet. They might have given him an 8-track tape and an iPad to see which one he would choose.
They could have shown him a bunch of TV commercials to see if he recognized how many of them featured music that had once been top-40 hits. That’s the way my grandkids have determined that I’m closing in on a thousand years or so.
In the end, the researchers decided that stopping Ming’s clock to see how long it had been ticking was the best way to go. Well, the best for the researchers, anyway.
So this New Year’s Eve, I’ll be thinking about Ming and trying to figure out how to live as long as he did before I leave him in my aging metaphoric dust.
Judging by all those ancient roughies, urchins, tube worms and quohogs, it looks like living at the bottom of the ocean is a surefire recipe for ripe old age. Ms. Calment didn’t live at the bottom of the sea, but she did live in Arles, France, which is right by the Mediterranean. She was probably pretty salty.
So if all the oldest critters on are briny beasts of the deep, then living at the bottom of the sea should probably be part of my immortality plan too, I guess.
And so as I open the paper and read about global warming, melting ice caps, rising ocean levels, and the gradual swamping of low-lying isles, British or otherwise, here is this New Year’s assessment of my progress toward eternal life:
So far, so good!
• Author, musician, and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
