THESE days, even with advances in health care, it is still significant when someone reaches the elusive milestone of 100 years old. But when two people living in the same house manage to get to that age? … most would say it’s a really big deal!

This is just the situation with two men, both over 100, both living at the same house at 17 St Mary Street in Port Maria, the main town of the north-east Jamaica parish of St Mary.

Although they are not biologically related, Jeremiah Dalhouse, 104, and Archibald Henry, 102, are tied philosophically and by marriage.

Dalhouse is Henry’s father-in-law and both share the common bond of praising God and doing what they can, despite some limitations, to lift the spirits of other members of their family.

As 2011 draws to a close, they both have no intention of taking their 100-plus years on Earth for granted and are grateful for their good health.

Dalhouse has a slight setback. His hearing is not what it was half of a century ago, and now one has to literally shout for him to hear what is being said.

On the brighter side, he is not stricken by any known disease, his blood pressure is normal and diabetes is a foreign word to him.

Henry has a sharp brain, can see objects a mile away, even without glasses, reads a lot, still walks around by himself (sometimes with the help of a cane), and does his yard chores like raking up leaves and planting trees around the premises that he owns.

While Dalhouse does not talk much, Henry’s voice is sometimes akin to that of a confident politician warming up on a campaign platform.

“I have enjoyed my life and I continue to enjoy it,” Henry told the Sunday Observer on Thursday.

“I still clean up the yard, weed up the place, and go on the street to (Emmanuel Baptist) church,” he said.

The street is symbolic for the man who was born on October 9, 1909, and who is married to Dalhouse’s only daughter, Ivy, a product of his second walk down the aisle. The former tinsmith told a tale which would make Olympic walkers tremble in pleasant admiration. He confessed to walking from his home at Port Maria all the way to Montego Bay and back, with a few stops along the way.

That happened in 1927, when he, as an 18-year-old, decided to seek work after leaving Port Maria Elementary School. Ideally, in order to make ends meet, he would need a job that would pay him more than the two shillings and sixpence a day that was the average wage in the parish at the time.

“I walked from Port Maria to Montego Bay and back, trying to see what life was like and looking for work,” Henry said.

“My first stop was Falmouth, and I went to places like Rose Hall, John’s Hall and Catadupa, but I didn’t like it and I couldn’t find a job.

“The pay was worse than what I could get in St Mary. The best I could get was two shillings a day, because those places were not as developed as St Mary at the time,” said the father of seven.

Yet, the Albion Mountainborn Henry did not waste time looking further. He returned home and later started his tinsmith business, one of the ailing, almost extinct professions.

What is the secret of his longevity?

“It’s the family nature,” he responded. “My grandfather, grandmother and father lived until they were very old. My grandmother also reached 100 years old.”

But it was his insistence on not indulging in some of the ‘niceties’ other men enjoyed, that he attributes to his long life.

“I never drink (alcohol) and I never smoke. I will give you this word of advice now: Avoid smoking and drinking. I eat everything you can think of, but since I lose my teeth I stop eating fish, because me fraid fi the bone.

“Every good food is my favourite. The happiest time of my life is swimming and diving during my youthful days and now I enjoy eating, drinking juice, praying and picking up the leaves,” he said.

Dalhouse, or Mass Jeremiah, as some residents call him, was intent on ensuring that at least one of his jokes hit the jackpot despite being in the midst of following instructions from his caregiver Melita Goldson.

“Everybody born with three cup… wha’ dem name?, he asked this writer.

“You born with two knee cup and one head cup,” came the answer, three seconds after the question was posed by the St Catherine-born Dalhouse, who came into this world on March 14, 1907.

Later, still intent on confirming himself as comedian extraordinaire, insisted on giving the plantain joke.

“A man went to thief a plantain from another man field,” he said, using his cane as a makeshift machete and demonstrated his detaching the plantain from its base.

“When the man was about to cut the plantain, him started to pray, saying, ‘the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want’.

“Before him could finish, him hear another voice hiding behind the plantain tree saying ‘If you cut it I will lay you down in green pastures’,” he said, explaining that the frightened would-be thief ran off leaving the machete behind.

These days, Mass Jeremiah, who worked as a carpenter and baker for all his life, spends most of his time praying.

“He is always praying, he doesn’t sleep a lot,” Dalhouse’s granddaughter Kathleen Dallin said.

“He too never drank and never smoke. He doesn’t eat late, and when he eats, he is into ground provisions. He doesn’t eat rice.

“He used to dance masquerade and was a member of the Salvation Army before he became a Baptist. He was never late for church, has no major medical complaints, in fact the last time he visited the doctor he was told that his blood pressure was better than the doctor’s,” she said.

Mass Jeremiah owns two houses in one yard on Cox Street on the other side of the town. In recent years he moved to live with his son-in-law Henry, and his daughter and granddaughter.

But he clearly remembers those years when street lights in Port Maria had to be turned on each evening by someone who would climb the electricity post to light the carbon-based ‘wick’ and climb back up against to put it out at dawn.

Henry, too, stopped taking prescribed medication for hypertension and diabetes two years ago, choosing to attack the diseases with lifestyle changes instead.

“The diabetes is under control and when he goes to the doctor, his blood pressure is not that bad,” Henry’s 82-year-old wife Ivy said.

Henry said that winning the right to marry Ivy from his father-in-law was not a challenge.

“Him never have no problem with that,” Henry said of a potential disagreement with his then girlfriend’s father.

“How I met her was a big story though. I met her when she was a helper of my first wife, and after my first wife passed, I made my move.

“I knew her already so it was easy to make it into real love,” Henry said.

Not wanting to be left out of the deliberations, Dalhouse, who also has a son, slipped in one parting shot:

“Everybody born with two bottom. The real bottom and the foot bottom,” he said.