Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Loose ends

Almost two weeks ago, writing in my other journal, I wrote the date on the top line with celebratory hearts, and flowers all around. It was my younger daughter’s birthday: February 28, 2026. The next morning, I wrote the date, March 1, 2026, and added: “Happy Birthday to all 2/29-ers whose existence should be joyfully acknowledged every year even though their natal days are not.”

I’ve always wondered about this awkward time anomaly that was created millennia ago as a solution to what would seem a non-problem. In fact, according to thoughtco.com, “Julius Caesar was behind the origin of leap year in 45 BC. The early Romans had a 355-day calendar and to keep festivals occurring around the same season each year, a 22 or 23-day month was created every second year. Julius Caesar … added days to different months of the year to create the 365-day calendar … In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII further refined the calendar with the rule that leap day would occur in any year divisible by four as described previously.”

Huh? It’s a technology thing, right? A human construct, in fact, like airplanes. We’ve come a distance from wax wings, haven’t we? In this uber-high-tech world of space travel and AI, it seems oddly sloppy that the best humans could come up with to rectify this alleged problem was, and still is, to take the grave and draconian step of depriving, over time, millions of humans the right to a legitimate annual birthday, a right enjoyed by every other last one of the rest of us.

And, to begin with, look what they did to February itself. According to our cyber-whiz-kid, AI, adding both January and February to the calendar was the brain-child of King Numa Pompilius who, around 713 BC, added them to a 10-month calendar to align with a 355-day lunar year. Romans considered even numbers unlucky, so he designed months to have 29 or 31 days, but to make the 12-month year total 355 days (an odd number), one month had to have an even number of days, so February was picked to be the runt of the litter due to superstition.

When the numbers still didn’t work, they forced little February to accommodate an extra day every four years, the benefits of which have remained elusive to non-existent — ask the should-be-16-year-old going for a learner’s permit, yet technically only a four-year-old last birthday.  

Seems like an “expedience” thing — like the wicked stepsister who simply chopped off her heel so she could jam her foot into that glass slipper — collateral damage and/or unintended consequences be damned.

Hitting on a messy, even violent, answer to a thorny situation has become the norm nowadays. It’s a dangerous thing to be seen as a loose end, or a part of one. Some“Leaplings,” as they have termed themselves, seem to regard the consequences they’ve had to deal with as quite mild and show remarkable forbearance, while others experience a disorienting lack of a birthday most years,only slightly offset by the inordinate attention a leap year offers them.

Several years ago, two Johns Hopkins scientists, Richard Henry and Steve H. Hanke, started talking about the problems associated with the Gregorian calendar, and in response developed the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar.

The new calendar would have just 364 days, and any given date would always fall on the same day of the week every year.It provides 30 days every February, which means no more leap days. There would be a February 29 every single year.

So if you’re a leap day baby, you’d get a birthday every year, whether you want it or not. The forever calendar has no leap day. Instead, it has a leap week, which is added to the end of December, not every four years, but every six years. How that will affect the babies born in that week isn’t quite clear, but their birthdays will be overshadowed by the December holidays anyway, with those stingy two-for-one presents.

And speaking of re-arranging time and dates, the clocks sprang forward last weekend, upsetting the rhythm our brains and bodies had settled into for months following that middle-of-the-night fallback we experienced last autumn.

Just ask the Island’s teachers how well their students have adjusted to that change this week, or parents and grandparents trying to figure out when dinner or bedtime should be for their confused, hungry little ones. Changing clocks? Another debate rages on.