Today is my birthday. It happens every year about this time so I’ve come to expect it. Sometimes it’s on Reds’ Opening Day and that makes me feel extra special. This year it’s on Opening Day Eve which is still pretty cool but I have to wait a day for the parade. Friday was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Dixie Highway Association and yesterday the 47th anniversary of the Martin Luther King assassination. Today is the 401st wedding anniversary of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. No gifts, please. It was 106 years tomorrow that Robert Peary reached (as far as he knew) the north pole. I was just two days old when Henry Ford died on April 7, 1947.

Today is also Easter. It’s quite popular in these parts so spicing up my birthday with an Easter Egg Hunt would probably be pretty easy. I’m thinking about it. Passover began at sundown Friday and is now entering its intermediate days (a.k.a. Chol Hamoed). That means participants can lighten up a little. Ramadan, which seems to be the Islamic holiday nearest my birthday, doesn’t start until mid-July. Hanuman Jayanti, a Hindu holiday was yesterday. Yesterday was also a full moon and for some a lunar eclipse. That’s certainly special and many Buddhists, in fact, celebrated the start of a new year yesterday in sync with the full moon. Tomorrow is a really special day for Mormons. It was April 6, 1830, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was formed in New York.

There appears to be no end to important events occurring on or near my birthday and it seems to be something of a magnet for religious holidays, too. It’s all rather humbling, really.

Addendum: I usually do better than this on fact checking but I was so sure that Easter and my birthday had  coincided a few times that I didn’t even check. Only after a couple of people asked me did I look into it and learn that this is only the second time in my life that Easter has fallen on April 5. The other was in 1953. It will happen again in 2026, 2037, and 2048 so I’ll rack up five of these if I make it to a hundred and one. I definitely should have made a bigger deal of today.