Last Friday was the birthday of my friend’s wife. However, since he had a busy day at work with important meetings, he did not get a chance to call his wife during the day and stayed in the office late. When he and I were the last ones to leave the office on Friday and something went wrong with an email that he was about to send out, I felt very sorry for him.
This week, he told me how his wife was upset. Even before hearing from him, I could guess her complaints. After talking and listening to him, I tried to close the conversation with a positive note. “Don’t worry. You won’t be going home late because of work next year, because her birthday is going to be on a Saturday.”
“How do you know?” My friend was very surprised that I knew which day his wife’s birthday would fall on. I replied, “It will be on Saturday next year, and then Sunday in the following year. Unless if there is a leap year, in which case it will skip a day.”
My friend then made fun of me for being very “Berkeley.” I laughed with him by laughing at myself, pretending that I acquired this observation about the calendar days because of my nerdiness from Berkeley. But if he knew that I had this piece of knowledge not because of my engineering and analytical training from college, but because I had loved a man.
Once upon a time, I had loved someone so much that I would plan a lot for his birthday and remember it by heart. In fact, I remembered it so well that very soon I started to observe the pattern — last year, I celebrated his birthday on this particular day of the week, and this year his birthday was falling on the day after. For all these years, I never noticed this trend on anyone’s birthday — not even my own. But because of him, I was able to draw this connection with just two data points.
Our paths will not cross anymore, but you have my best wishes, sent while I am standing afar on a parallel line. Happy Birthday.
