It was in a university English seminar that I first learned about The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. My professor told us these Orient tales were used by Western writers in the eighteenth century as fantastical narrative forms to comment on their own domestic circumstances. Orient tales like Nights were then abridged into children’s books and imbued with bourgeois morals designed to educate young readers on how to be good, upstanding Europeans.

I don’t drive, and living in Toronto I’ve been happy to take public transit wherever I go. Yet my family doctor is in Oakville, so when I need to see her I go home for the weekend and take a cab to my appointment. It was the day after lecture on Nights when I found myself in a cab with a driver who told me he was from Turkey.

He asked about me. I told him I was graduating from university in June.

“You are entering your donkey years,” he said sagely.

I thought I had misheard him, but when I saw him looking at me through the rear-view mirror, eyes smiling, I realized I hadn’t. I asked him what he meant, and he told me this story.

Once upon a time, there lived a donkey, a dog, a monkey, and a human. The donkey, dog, and monkey each had a life span of forty years while the human’s was only twenty. Yet each animal had their unique grievances. The donkey was weary of a life spent working hard for others and being treated poorly for little compensation. The dog was weary of guarding his property and spending its days barking to protect it. The monkey was weary because all anyone did was make fun of how silly it was. The human had no grievances because his life was easy and pleasant, his only complaint being that it was so short.

Watching from above, Allah saw their suffering and transported them to Heaven. He listened to the donkey, dog, and monkey’s complaints in turn before turning to the human.

“The other animals say they wish their lives were shorter, but your life is good. What then is your grievance?”

“Nothing. I only wish my life were longer,” the human replied.

Thinking for a moment, Allah announced a solution.

“The donkey, dog, and monkey are all weary of their lives and wish them to be shorter, so I will cut their lives in half and give these extra years to the human.”

The cabbie said that I was now, at twenty-one, one year removed from my human years and had now entered my donkey years. My human years had been easy, carefree, and pleasant. Upon graduating, my donkey years would involve taking jobs where I worked hard for long hours with little pay as I climbed the career ladder. When I turned forty I would enter my dog years, where I’d peak professionally and would bark orders at people beneath me to safeguard the success I had achieved in my twenties and thirties. When I turned sixty, I would spend the rest of my life in my monkey years, my grandchildren making fun of me for being so silly.

“In all my life, I have never met anyone who was able to disprove my story. Can you?” He asked. I said I couldn’t – he was exactly right.

When we arrived at the clinic I told him I would share his story, and did so with my family and friends. Since I’m sharing it here, you too can spread the wisdom I learned from a cabbie.

This article appeared online at blogut.ca here.