LEAPING BIRTHDAY
They’ve heard all the jokes: Juhl
Kendra Gosman is celebrating her seventh birthday at the bar where she works.
Gosman, my niece, was born Feb. 29, 1992. That’s seven leap days ago.
Leap years happen because the Earth, making its orbit around the sun, doesn’t respect our 365day calendar. We need an extra day every four years to make up the difference — unless it’s a century year, which is only a leap year if it’s divisible by 400, like the year 2000.
Gosman walks with purpose — that’s a leapling trait, she says — and keeps a pristine bar at Voodoo Lounge in Lasalle. While she’s wiping down surfaces and checking glasses for spots, she’ll share leap-year trivia.
She knows that the chance of being born on a leap day are about one in 1,461, and that traditionally the leap day is reserved for women to propose to their lovers. She’s independent enough to say women can propose whenever they want — Pisces are like that, she adds. She says leap years bring exceptionally cold weather. It was -20 C in Montreal the day she was born, but warmer in the years since — leaplings are also optimistic, she says.
She mentions leap year traditions that focus on death, but doesn’t dwell on them. One of her brothers was born on Friday the 13th and another on Halloween, so perhaps the darker side is best left to them.
Gosman has never met another leap-year baby, but they are out there. Sugar Sammy is one; Henri Richard is another. So is Superman, who was born on 35 Eorx 9998 on the Kryptonian calendar, which corresponds with Feb. 29.
There’s also Nina Elston, who works in a Montreal accounting office.
Elston is turning 44, but she won’t be annoyed if you talk to her about being 11.
“I really enjoy watching people try to figure out my ‘age.’ My usual response is that I am forever young,” Elston says. She has 11 nieces and nephews who “get a kick out of being older than me. I only have one nephew and one niece who are still younger than me.”
Elston’s blended family is made up of herself and five siblings who hadn’t all been in the same room at the same time until four years ago, when, she says, “I got to skip turning 40. For my 10th, we were able to all be together and it was amazing.
“I wish that when it is a leap year they would indicate on the calendar that it is a leap day on the 29th,” Elston says. “Anyone can be born during a leap year — being born the 29th is what makes it extra special.”
Elston usually marks her birthday on Feb. 28, following her mother’s lead. Gosman says that when she was a child, she had birthday parties only every four years: “I was mad when I figured it out, but then I got over it.”
On non-leap years, she celebrates on both Feb. 28 and March 1 to make up for lost time. In the meantime, she rolls with the punches when people tease her about her age. She’s had instances of people telling her partner that dating her is a felony since she’s “only seven.”
“I just take it,” she says. “I won’t react, but karma will.”
Speaking of birthdays and bartenders, the Savoy Hotel’s renowned bartender Harry Craddock invented a Leap Day cocktail in 1928: two ounces of gin, half an ounce each of Grand Marnier and vermouth, and a splash of lemon juice. Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail glass and raise a toast to the leaplings of Montreal.