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Imagine you are on a very large rock that is covered mostly
by water with pieces of land jutting out here and there. The
rock is travelling just over 67,000 miles per hour and you are
93 million miles from the Sun, give or take a few thousand
miles due to your elliptical path. Under your feet , way down
under your feet, is a mass of minerals and metals, mostly
rock, heated to a molten state that is keeping you from
freezing solid on your trip.
You have just crossed over a point like latitude zero at the
Greenwich Meridian in merry old England and you are on
your way to a year of solitude in space that will take your
vehicle, the Earth, 365 days to complete. Then you count
them, each and every one, 365 sunrises and 365 sunsets
and now darkness covers you once more and you are about
to cross that meridian again to complete your 365 day orbit of the star we call the sun which gives life to our planet.
But wait, we are not yet there. You inquire of a fellow traveler who seems not to be concerned and he informs you that we still have 6 hours to go. But, you tell him, we have completed 365 full days of travel. Then you learn that it actually takes the Earth
365 days and 6 hours, give or take a few minutes, to travel that egg shaped orbit about the Sun. But what do we do about that extra 6 hours that that we have left over every year?
This question came up way back in the time of the Egyptians. They noticed that the calendar they were using to plant and plan seemed to be falling behind the actual solar year. Some fancy calculations, like 6 hours per year and if we do it every 4 years, that’s 24 hours, led them the idea of adding a day to their calendar every 4 years in order to solve their problem. So by leaping ahead one 24-hour period every 4 years, they gave birth to our leap year.
This idea carried over to the Romans who, try as they might, could not come up with a better idea so they adopted it as a solution to their solar year problem. Wanting to put their own stamp on it, they went one step further. They declared February 29 as Leap Day every 4 years.
Even with all of this work, there were still a few loose ends that needed tying up. It turns out that, after even more research, the time in question is not quite 6 whole hours. It comes up short by 11 minutes and 13 or 14 seconds. So, the keepers of Pope Gregory’s calendar, which most of the world adopted in the 1500’s, decided to play a little more with the number four.
We’ve always been told that any numbered year, evenly divided by 4 is a leap year. But the powers of that era, in charge of the calendar and time, needed an exception to help balance out those extra leap minutes. They looked around for a way to play with the numbers, knowing that they needed something that would last for all time, it would have to be something that happened only once in a while. They birthed the idea that a century year cannot be designated as a Leap Year unless it can be divided evenly by 400, figuring that over a period of 300 or 400 hundred years that would solve the leap minute problem and, to their credit, it seems to have worked.
But alas and alack, we have overlooked the “seconds” problem. To make matters even worse, the old earth is slowing down a bit in its orbit each year. It seems the tides, over a period of thousands and thousands of years have had a braking effect on our spin around the Sun. The current world keepers of time add a few seconds to our Big Ben and Atomic clocks occasionally to keep them up to date. Almost a dozen seconds have been added in the past 40 years or so but now someone has suggested that we stop that practice and forget the seconds, so stay tuned…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we can just sit back and enjoy this extra day we are given this year. One of my favorite nephews, Doug, has a son who will have a ball on February 29. His name is Zachary and he will officially be 5 years old and has already completed two years at Harford Community College. Of course, Zac will actually be 20 and enjoys the fact that his birthday is a special day while we all enjoy the fact that Zachary is as special as his day.
Here’s one last fact about Leap Year that may give you a chuckle. Have you ever heard of St Bridgit’s Complaint? In today’s society, it is perfectly normal for a girl to ask a guy to marry but in the “olden days” it was seldom done. Seems though that in ancient Ireland a lass, named Bridgit, had a complaint she felt needed to be heard. She approached St. Patrick and shared that she felt it wasn’t fair that the girls had to wait for the boys to pop the big question. St Patrick thought long and hard and came up with a solution. He told Bridgit that it would be okay for the girls to ask a boy for their hand in marriage, but they could do it only once every four years, on February 29, during the Leap Year. I don’t know if this had anything to do with Bridgit making Sainthood, but I guess it didn’t hurt.
I would like to offer my own suggestion for Leap Day this coming year of 2012. We have the rest of the month to get organized and to find as many others as we can to join us. I propose that we spend February 29 in a special way - by paying it forward with acts of kindness. Tip your hat to a stranger, call someone you haven’t spoken to in a long time, maybe there is a family member with which you need to make amends. How about doing a good deed that day; visit someone who is not as fortunate as you or maybe someone who is confined to their home. Just buying someone a cup of coffee could bring forth a smile and make a friend.
It’s an extra day that was saved up for us over the past 4 years and how we use it could help us survive over the next 4 years…so choose wisely.
-------Don Langrehr
What's all this leap year stuff about anyway?
