“The Jerky”

Marty Miller was an old timer. He smoked a pipe and dressed for the weather. He played the spoons and the fiddle late into the night. He hunted everything a Newfoundlander could hunt. And he fished when there was no money in it.

At 78 years of age, Marty had thirteen children, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and a beagle, named Henry.

One warm afternoon, Marty was about to leave the corner store when he noticed a box of strange, shrink-wrapped sticks sitting on the counter near the cashier.

“What’r dey?” He asked the young man behind the register.

“Those? They’re beef jerky.”

“Any good?”

“Oh yeah – I eat them all the time.”

That afternoon, Marty left the store with a new item in his plastic bag. The brown, shrink-wrapped meat stick the boy on the register called “jerky.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just calling you a jerk?” His wife asked when he returned from his walk.

“No. I don’t think so, anyway,” he said. “Apparently all the young people are into it.”

“Young people are into a lot of things,” she said, “many of which an old fella like you ought to avoid.”

So Marty placed the jerky into a drawer and pushed it shut. But he didn’t forget about it.

Weeks passed; then months. Soon it was Marty’s 79th birthday, and the entire Miller family was in attendance. They’d thrown him a garden party. A garden party for Marty, who, for the first time in his life, sitting proud at the head of the large collapsible table his family had rented for the occasion, began to feel old.

As he struggled within himself to form a simple wish worth blowing out his candles about, a sudden youthful feeling overcame him. He stood, turned, and without saying a word headed for the back door to the house. The kids, grandkids, and especially Mrs. Miller, all exchanged worried glances and there was a good deal of hushed whispering. To their relief, a moment later, Marty returned and took his seat in front of his cake.

“Where’d you go?” his wife asked him.

“Oh, nowhere…” Marty replied. And with that, from underneath the table, Marty pulled the long, shrink-wrapped stick of dried preserved meat.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Mrs. Miller sighed.

And with that, Marty bit off the end of the plastic wrapper with his false teeth, spat it onto the table, peeled back what was left, and took a mammoth-sized chomp.

“Now what on God’s earth does that prove?” his wife asked.

And then Marty, through a grin that could only be seen as expressing the most extreme satisfaction, replied:

“It proves age don’t mean a thing.”

“And how’s that?”

“The expiry date on this ting isn’t for another ten years!”

An uproar of laughter followed, and Marty, sucking in as deep a breath as his lungs could take, wished to live at least as long as his stick of beef jerky would have.

As he blew out his candles, spitting little chewings of jerky onto the cake but nevertheless extinguishing them all, Marty Miller felt new. Again.