Centuries

Luisa A. Igloria

April 27


A hundred is usually the highest possible
score on an exam. Pliny the Elder was 
supposed to be the first person in recorded 
history to reach a hundred. It is the age 
to which my mother aspired to live—a hundred
flickering candles on a pink and white iced cake, 
a hundred pink roses brought to her room 
at the care home by friends who still remembered— 
except she kicked the can three months shy 
of her ninety-third. In the village of Ogimi, 
north of Okinawa, most of the population are 
centenarians. They eat a diet rich in fish and fresh 
fruit and vegetables, and gather to play cards 
or cricket. They put up a marker which reads 
At the age of 80, I'm still a child. When God 
comes to call me at 90, I tell him to wait until 
I turn 100. I don' think I will want to live a century, 
which is a long time. In Tagalog, one word for century 
is síglo, quite directly related to the Spanish síglo, 
since Spain colonized the Philippines for nearly
four hundred years—an even longer time. 
If everyone I love passes on ahead of me,
I know how gutted I'd feel. Perhaps this is also
very secular— a feeling related to worldly things,
things that are temporal and bound to perish.
Pliny the Elder said, The only certainty is
that nothing is certain, though in his day
(as though they could be certain), emperors 
and historians named a length of time roughly 
equivalent to the potential lifetime of a person, 
or the time allotted to a people or civilization,
a saeculum. When all people who lived
at the founding of an empire finally died,
the start of a new saeculum could be
declared.  It seems unlikely it would take
only a hundred years to wipe out everything,
and then start as if from scratch. But a hundred
seems a nice, solid number: one confident 
downstroke, followed by two perfect circles.