getting my monthlies

Ever since the demise of Julius Caesar, March has seemed a somewhat forbidding month. One can have a certain degree of affection for it, but it seems always out of your control. It is regal in its implacable power. Will the blustery March wind blow in or will it bring us a comfortable spring thaw? We do not know nor can we.

In contrast, April -- no matter what its deficiencies in any given year -- seems downright genial. It may rain and rain and rain throughout the month (as it's doing now outside my New York City window) but still we welcome April. We root for it. Sure, May is famous for its flowers, but by May spring is already in full bloom. It's in the month of April that we start to feel that glorious sense of anticipation. Sometimes the only thing better than feeling good is the consciousness that one is about to feel good very soon.

I'm a biased observer, of course. Like so many auspicious individuals (including Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth II, and Adolf Hitler), I was born in the month of April and it's always been good to me. Somehow April always seems like the real start of the year -- it has more of a claim to that feeling, I think, than January. The artificial beginning of the calendar was established in January, I suspect, because that is the darkest time of year (at least in the Northern hemisphere, which is where these things got set). People wanted to place some kind of signpost there to say, "Well, at least we're making progress. We're moving out of this."

But it's in April usually that I start to feel new again and I suspect that many of you out there have had the same experience. As March wound down to a close this week, I was conscious of a remarkable degree of sychronicity in the world around me. On Wednesday evening, as I walked from Houston to 14th St. (which took probably 10 minutes or less) I passed no fewer than four acquaintances -- two tenants who live in the building where I work, one woman who works for a non-profit we collaborate with, and a college classmate I hardly know. I didn't really stop to talk to any of them, but somehow as I made the journey uptown it seemed to say that something was brewing...

Could be...
Who knows?
There's somethin' due any day,
And I'll know right away,
Soon as it shows....

Perhaps April doesn't seem as significant to you. Well, then, answer me this: Why does no one name their child "March"?

And, come to think of it, why not "July" either?