For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.Through some singular coincidence — I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy —You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over!
W. S. Gilbert – The Pirates of Penzance
If he were alive today my paternal grandfather, George Lardas, would be 128 years old. He would only be celebrating his 31st birthday, though. He was born on February 29. That meant his birthday only came around once every four years. He was even cheated of one of those – the critical 8th birthday when you are old enough to anticipate the celebration and still young enough to appreciate its magic. 1900, which is not divisible by 400, was not a leap year. He, unlike Frederic in Pirates of Penzance, did see his 21st birthday, which occurred in 1980 before finally dying in 1988 – after February 29.
He saw some tumultuous changes in his lifetime. He was born on the island of Icaria, a Greek island off the Turkish coast. (His mother was a Pastis, which means I am distantly related to cartoonist Stephen Pastis,) He grew up on his family’s sailing barque, a three-masted sailing ship, carrying cargoes between Alexandria, Piraeus and Constantinople. He lived to see the launch of Apollo 11. (It took off on my birthday, a fact he noted on the card he sent that year.)
He came to the United States somewhere in the early 1910s, before World War I. He earned his American citizenship during that war, the hard way as a Doughboy in Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force. He was wounded in combat during the Meuse-Argonne battle, a scout in the the 32nd (Buckeye) Division. When I was a child, he would show my brothers and me the piece of shrapnel still stuck in his skull. (It was a thin small piece of steel flush with his bald scalp.)
He spent his career as a carpenter and a chef, depending on the market. During World War II and the years immediately preceding he was a carpenter at a shipyard. I only learned this in my late teens, when I showed him a model of the battleship New Jersey I had built. Then he told me he helped build the chart room of the battleship. (That ship is now on display in Pearl Harbor. My middle son visited it a few years back, and he went into the chart room his great-grandfather helped build.)
So here is to you papou (Greek for grandfather) as yet another of your birthday’s rolls around.
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