One day, early in a summer morning, when Mr. Roger Button came face to face with his family physician, he sensed something was wrong. Not just wrong but very, very, and definitely very wrong.
When Mr. Button asked about his wife and newborn baby, Dr. Keene looked very irritated. And agitated.
“… I brought you into the world, young man, and I've been physician to your family for forty years, but I'm through with you! I don't want to see you or any of your relatives ever again! Good-bye!"
The angry doctor almost cast him aside to walk away.
Mr. Button had lost his courage to go inside the hospital. What had happened?
Tentatively, he mustered his strength and went inside.
When he gave his name to the pleasant-looking nurse he found inside, she seemed overcome by terror. The girl looked like she could barely control herself from running away as she gave him the direction.
Mr. Button's pace slowed even more.
After he had reached the second floor, he saw another nurse and approached her. The moment he had said his name, she dropped the basin she was carrying.
Mr. Button was desperate now.
The nurse, then, took him to the "crying-room" of the hospital. To show him his newborn baby.
Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-colored beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window.
Just imagine his surprise and shock when he saw a seventy year old man, instead of the cute and cuddly doll of a baby he was expecting to see!
Yes, Mrs. Button had given birth to a seventy-something old man!
And what is more, that "baby" is not as sweet as babies usually are. That cranky old man.
Mr. Button's son's voice followed him down into the: hall: "And a cane, father. I want to have a cane."
And the life started.
Benjamin Button was not an ordinary baby — that was a fact. Still, it was a bit hard to digest the face that he started smoking his father's cigars before he was five!
His life got more complicated when he went to get admitted in college…
Charming and much interesting is the tale F. Scott Fitzgerald has written as a short story. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is truly remarkable a story, and there is no denying it. The author had, so picturesquely, described what Mr. Button had to face with his old "son", who started growing younger as days passed by.
What happens to him next? What more disasters await for him in his upside-down life? Do read the book to know what is the final phase of "growing down"…