Leap Day!

This is a "free day" we get once every four years, so make the best of it! It ought to be a national holiday so we could sleep in, or get up early to go fishing or skiing, or wait for something magical to happen, like the one day every hundred years when the Scottish village of Brigadoon reappears.

But, no. It will be just another day at work for most of us, an imperfect way to make the calendar coincide with the time required for the Earth to encircle the Sun.

Consider this: We have presidential elections every Leap Year. We have the Summer Olympics every Leap Year. I was born in a Leap Year but, thankfully, not on Leap Day, or else I'd have had a lifetime of confusion and joking about when to celebrate my birthday (the correct answer should be: every Saturday night).

One quaint custom associated with Leap Day is that this is when a woman may propose marriage, and a variation is that she may do so on any day of a Leap Year. This reminds me of Sadie Hawkins Day, which became a feature of Al Capp's "Li'l Abner," and if you don't know who that was, just look up Sadie Hawkins in Wikipedia. In Tarpon Springs, FL, where we once lived, they celebrated Sadie Hawkins Day with a street dance downtown. For boys like me, Sadie Hawkins Day was a scary thought. Now that I'm older and somewhat wiser, I think it should be revived.