Leaplings and other people

Every four years, something not quite inexplicable takes place that may or may not strongly affect your life.

No, not a presidential election, although that happens to be not only every four years but the same year each time, and will almost certainly affect your life one way or another.

This is something else again. Next week, the calendar will include an extra day, Feb. 29, in this 2024 leap year. Unless you were born on that day — and only a few people have actually managed that hat trick, about 187,000 in the United States — the day may prove to be little more than a whimsical oddity.

But over in the Port of Miami it will be a day of action for leaplings, as leap day babies are called, those born on this unusual little day hanging off the sleeve of the second month on the Gregorian calendar like a loose thread on a neatly starched shirt or blouse.

There, organizers are hoping that by Feb. 26, more than 250 leaplings will have signed up for a cruise to CocoKay and Nassau in the Bahamas on a ship called the Freedom of the Seas. (If you happen to be a spur-of-the-moment leapling, you may still have a couple of days to sign up, at www.Leapdaybirthdaybash.com .) The cruise will take them right through their birthday and into both March 1 and possibly a new “Guinness Book of World Records” entry for the largest number of people ever gathered in one place to celebrate a Feb. 29th birthday.

Leap year goes back a long way — to Julius Caesar in 47 B.C.E., and his Julian calendar, which borrowed the notion from the Egyptians — but our version, based on the calculations and, I suppose, consecrations of Pope Gregory XIII, became the working civil calendar in the West and ultimately the world starting in the 16th century.

According to people who know a lot more than I do about astronomy, our blue and spinning planet completes a single revolution about the sun not in 365 days, exactly, but in just over that: 365.2422 days. I would just round that fraction up to a 365.25, like Caesar did (probably the only thing I’d do like Caesar did), but then every 128 years the calendar would be off by a day, and those days add up throwing everything off, eventually. In the more precise Gregorian calendar, however — still not flawless in its exactitude — we’ll be off by a day every 3,030 years.

But let’s not hang around to find out.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, we should take the day simply to ruminate on our ordinary but still glorious places in the universe, perhaps. If ruminating’s not your thing, you could gesticulate, say at Florida drivers who enter the left lane and slow down to exactly the speed limit, or even slower than that, while talking animatedly on their cell phones. Or you could masticate — something luscious, I hope, probably with a classic

French name like Moules Mariniere or Cassoulet or Escargots or even that French comfort food, Beef Bourguignon.

A few famous people or events have been born or taken place on Leap Days, but I probably won’t point those out. I will point out, however, that on Feb. 29, 1972, when Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” and Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years” were high on the charts, future Hall of Famer Hank Aaron became the first baseball player to earn an average annual salary of $200,000 on a three-year contract with the Atlanta Braves. He was coming off a season in which he hit .327, with 47 home runs and 118 RBIs. That’s worth about $1.475 million today.

If you’re not a baseball fan, just gesticulate.

And if you’re worried about getting your name in lights, like I am — about becoming rich, famous and powerful, the king of the jungle, perhaps, when you grow up, which remains my ambition — you might take at least part of Leap Day, not to masticate, not to gesticulate, but to consider the words of an actual leapling, the late American poet Howard Nemerov, who also happened to be born on Feb. 29, 1920, a mere 104 years ago.

He had this to say about being ordinary, without the star power of presidents or kings, a thing particularly applicable in a leap year, which also happens to be a presidential election year. He called his little ditty “Political Reflection” (1956), the political reflection of “loquiter the sparrow in the zoo”:

“No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine

To keep me from the eagle and the lion,

Whom keepers feed that I may freely dine.

This goes to show that if you have the wit

To be small, common, cute, and live on shit,

Though the cage fret kings, you may make free with it.”

The word Loquitur, the sparrow’s name, means “begins to speak.” It’s the stage direction written in the script for a character entering the action in a play. A poet is a sparrow, of sorts, and when Nemerov was born, Warren G. Harding was the president. When the sparrow turned 70, the year before he died in 1991, George H.W. Bush had come into the White House. Sic transit gloria mundi — so pass the glories of the world on anybody’s calendar.

This year, a 46th or 47th president will win the stage. And we leaplings and other people will still be small, common, and (though not really in my case) cute. ¦

The post Leaplings and other people first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .