dayton is not in ohio

This is my birth month. April 14th, the day, is approaching. Now before y’all go run out and get me gift cards to Home Depot, you must know that what I like about April is that it is SPRING. The budding flowers, the chirping birds, the grass, the rain… spring. Growing up in New Orleans this meant that I actually had a birthday party flood out. This was St. Bernard parish, the parish wiped off the map by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named… Y’know… her. The important part here is that the friends that lived on the block were able to wade or canoe over for the celebration of my special day. The important part is that I never had a birthday snowed out. That’s why I was born in April.

Oh, God knew that I could endure hardship… 4-14 is also known as Ruination Day, and canonized by Gillian Welch in her songs titled “April the 14th (Part 1)” and “Ruination Day (Part 2).” I’m sharing them with you here. Don’t listen to them if you are already depressed, unless you’re looking to be pushed over the edge. The songs deal with what sounds like a depressing gig, and recount Black Sunday, the worst day of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl which basically kicked off the Great Depression, the sinking of the Titanic, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, all of which happened on, well, I think you can guess. I also remember CNN celebrating one of my birthdays with day-long reports about how we were bombing Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya back to the stone age. Ah! Shock and awe in its terrible twos!

But, given all the mayhem, strife and suffering associated with my birth date, God did not make April cold. April is the joyous youth of the earth’s warmth. I know, I know… It’s a big world, and for half of it, this is autumn, but in his sovereignty God ordained that I should be born into the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Perhaps I have wandered too far, like a sheep gone astray, into the arctic north.