My 70th birthday

I had a belief that I might die before turning to 70. It had been following me like a shadow, and emerged  to annoy me more frequently as it was closer to my 70th birthday.

Each time this thought crept   upon me,  my thoughts would  switch to my father's words when he was still alive. He used to say that he would die of being choked by anything before 69 of age.

The reasons why he stuck to this claim was because his father died at age 59 and was suffering from  chronic pneumonia for the last few years of his life. So then, I remember that for a reasonably long period of time during which my father was 59, and by coincidence he coughed quite seriously for no reason in that year. My mother was very worried and nervous about whether my father would die as he predicted.

Luckily the worst thing did not happen. There's a common belief among Taiwanese people that if you fall ill in the year of which your age happens to be something 9, for instance of 49, 59, 69, 79 and so on. Now that the 59th birthday crisis of my father was over. Very soon his 69th birthday was upcoming.

This time my father often claimed that he was likely to die in the year when he was 69 for the reason that no precedent householders of Chen family  lived beyond 69. And again my mother lived nervously through that year. When at last my father turned to be 70 safly without any ailment he changed his slogan to a more grateful one "I am not included in the premature death list now, contrarily I am one of the long lived. "

Having known the anecdotes of my father, you guys who are reading this article should have got some ideas about how I felt and feel before and after my 70th birthday.