Birthdays

My niece Kristin celebrated her birthday this past Friday and her husband Garret celebrated his on Saturday. I hope they had a wonderful time and that their new year of life is filled with happiness.

Birthdays tend to clump up. My brother and my other niece were born in October. My mother and my sister-in-law were born in December. My nephew's two daughters were born in February. My other niece may give birth in February, and her son and I were born in May. Kristin's son and daughter were both born in June. And two stepdaughters in this outfit were born in February. It may be the shortest month, but there are four (soon maybe five) birthdays in that month for my family. My nephew is the lone April birth, although he also celebrates his anniversary that month. His wife is the only July birth, but my father's mother was born in July and Kristin and Garret have a July anniversary. Brandon, Kirstin's mate, is the only one in August. To the best of my knowledge, that is uniquely his. But then I don't know all the birthdays and anniversaries in his family or in my sister-in-law's (and so Kirstin's) family...

My father, James Byron Dodd, -- Byron to everyone who knew him -- was born in 1921. For almost half his life, he celebrated his birthday on October 17. That is the date of birth on his school records and his military records from when he served in the Navy during World War II.

He was a great teacher. In the early 1960s, he applied for a job as principal of the school at a Job Corps Center near where we lived. Things seemed to go well in the application process. but then there was a long and unexplained lull. We had just about given up hope when they contacted him. He found out that the federal government was concerned that his birth certificate indicated that he had been born on September 17 and everything else said October 17. The discrepancy bothered them, even in those pre-Homeland Security days. They had contacted his parents about it, something that riled my grandfather a bit, I am sure, since he had little use for the government to start with.

The United States government finally decided or decreed that Byron's real date of birth was September 17, 1921 and they gave him the job. 

His mother insisted that he had been born in  October, basing her belief in part on the fact that they were making some kind of syrup at the time. My father checked with an uncle who assured him that they made that syrup in September in Georgia, not in October. So my father was convinced and ever after told people he was born in September. He had it changed on things like his Social Security records and his driver's license.

My mother, on the other hand, could not bring herself to accept that a mother would forget in what month her second son was born. So she continued to believe somewhat in the October date. She and I always wished my father happy birthday on both dates -- the official one that everyone else including him accepted and celebrated, and the October one that only my mother, I and he remembered. I used to tell he he was twice his age because he had two birthdays.

He died August 9, 2011, just a few weeks short of his 90th birthday in September and his 180th in October. Had he lived to January 10, 2012, he and my mother would have celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary.
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His tombstone lists his date of birth as September 17, 1921.

The small marker from the Veterans Administration that is at the foot of the grave lists his birth as October 17, 1921. 

Some folks think we should have that corrected. My mother and I think he would have liked it just the way it is.