Who Shares Your Birth Day?

I bet you have looked up who shares your date of birth. And if you have done that in some almanac or online, I suspect you looked to see if there was some connection to your birthmates.

As a kid, I was told that my birthday was the same as Mickey Mantle and growing up in northern New Jersey that made being a Yankees fan required.

In my guitar-playing I-want-to-be-a-rock-star days, it was comforting to read that I shared a birth day AND year with Tom Petty.

My more mature poet self likes that I share a day with Rimbaud and, fellow Jersey boy, Robert Pinsky.

I guess we want to believe that there is some cosmic connection to our birth day . It is like that horoscope you say you don't believe until it tells you something that you already believe or want to believe.

Want to know about your day? Wikipedia will actually give you births, deaths, historic events, etc. - just type in a date like October 20 and check it out.

Adam Gopnik writes in his book Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Birth of the Modern Age about two famous men who have a shared date of birth - February 12, 1809. Two births, one in America, one in England; one in a Kentucky log cabin and one in an English country estate. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Gopnik's book examines both lives and looks for connections - family men, social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers.

It tries to reconcile Lincoln, the good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death

It looks at how the very rational Darwin delayed publishing his “Great Idea” for almost twenty years because it did not match with his religious views.

Both men shared inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child. It changed both men.