My Birthday Pals
On my birthday weekend, I got to thinking about some of the fascinating characters who share my birthday. Among them:
Michelle Obama
Mohammed Ali
Benjamin Franklin
Betty White
Jim Carrey
James Earl Jones
Fun fact about Mohammed Ali – I shook hands with him in front of the JW Marriott once. His hands were 3x the size of mine.
A quick check on something called the “Famous Birthdays” website revealed that I also share a birthday with the following “YouTube Stars” and “TikTok Stars.”
Natalie Reynolds
Jake Paul
Quenlin Blackwell
McKinley Richardson
Nicole Murawska
Skeppy
I have no idea who any of these people are. But I doubt they know who I am either. I take some consolation in that they probably also don’t know who Benjamin Franklin is.
This birthday weekend, I also stumbled upon another famous person I was not aware of: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., born exactly one year before me. You may recall him as the sponsor of our current measles epidemic and an evangelist for whole milk, something that has been on our grocery shelves since before I was born. Just FYI, I actually bought whole milk a few weeks ago for my grandson before the recent performance art at the White House. The fine people at Harris-Teeter had no idea they were complicit in my revolutionary act.
This weekend, I also watched a 2018 Netflix documentary about his father, Bobby Kennedy for President. If you are of a certain age, it will make you cry and lament the strange paths that have led us to where we are now. Watching it brought to mind the time I spent reflecting on the nature of trauma and the long tail it leaves upon lives and families when I wrote Immigrant Secrets.
When my father was almost 13, he stood in the 6th-floor window of their tenement apartment, not far from the Flatiron Building, promising to jump if his mother did not go along with the demands of the police. She threatened him with an iron as he tried to defuse the situation. All of this would land her in the Central Islip Insane Asylum and from there to the Buffalo Asylum, never to emerge. He never once talked about this, but I know the trauma must have left a mark.
Turning to RFK, what would it have been like as a 9-year-old to see your uncle murdered? And then your father, just 4 years later? And to have lived all this in the most public of fishbowls, with every move and every reaction subject to scrutiny. I can’t imagine.
Now, all that doesn’t mean I can excuse RFK’s anti-science claptrap and the damage he is causing all of us.
Trauma has a long tail. Perhaps I should put my Christianity into practice and have more empathy for how he wound up where he is. After all, he too is one of God’s children. Yikes, that’s hard to say. I will admit this is not easy.
But hell, we do share a birthday.
