My TOTALLY TRUE Witchcraft-Related Semi-Walpurgisnacht-Relevant (Quasi-)Adventure

O.k., so it was back in high school and the usual suspects (me, the mighty Statisticasaurus Rex, Midget, Boehmer, Rick)--plus Rick's weird friend Jeff--decided to go up to St. Louis to this magic shop--a witchcraft-type magic shop, not a card-trick-type magic shop.

Now, although we were quite the little D&D freaks, we didn't actually believe in that witchcraft crap, of course. However: (a) we thought it was kinda cool and (b) little empiricists that we were, we weren't willing to conclude with certainty that none of that stuff worked without at least giving it a try.

So we figured it was time to give it a try.

Well, there's no need to discuss in detail all of the things that may or may not have been done that day, what may or may not have been consumed--but we eventually found the shop. It was a little dim and dusty and a little creepy, but not as much as you might think, and had the requisite giant glass bottles filled with gross stuff. Pig fetuses and snakes...wing of bat, eye of newt...that sort of thing. And there was a big black dog roaming around the store...but he turned out to be too lethargic to be scary.

Anyway, we bought some cool stuff like parchment made from unborn lamb skin, a copy of the "Greater Key of Soloman," and a couple of other "spell books." Since at the time I thought it very important that everyone know exactly what I was thinking at every time, I announced--fairly loudly, and as we were leaving--that "all this stuff is bullshit." Which was true, of course, but very rude to say.

By that evening we found ourselves back in our natural habitat, sitting around S. rex's folks' kitchen table. The day had been long and a little weird and fairly tiring, but now we were back home checking out our swag.

(Incidentally, don't knock playing D&D and sitting around the rexs' kitchen table... It's better than what we mostly did before that which was drink too much and drive around doing things that we shouldn't have been doing. In fact, to this day I suspect that Dungeons and Dragons and the rexs' willingness to let us sit in their kitchen all the time may very well have saved my life and/or limbs--or at least kept me out of jail. No kidding.)

So it's gotten dark on a quiet, warm Missouri evening, and four of us--S. rex, Boehmer, Midget and I--are tiredly but happily reading our newly aquired spell books, mostly--but not quite entirely--making fun of them, when I happend upon a list of the "four high witches' holidays" in the book I was reading. The most powerful of the holidays was, unsurprisingly, Halloween.

But the second most powerful holiday was February 2nd, Candlemas (aka Groundhog's Day)--my birthday!

Now, I was immediately extremely psyched about this because not only was it quite cool but it was a real status coup. I mean, born on the second-most-powerful witches' holiday...suh-weet! My comrades, I immediately thought, were going to be way envious.

So I'm like "Hey, listen to this," and I laid the news on them, trying to hide my glee.

There was a good bit of envy-laced excitement over this development, and some 'ooh'ing and 'ah'ing, and I reveled in my added coolness for the minute or two this took.

Then somebody asked "so what're the other ones?"

"The third one is Walpurgis Night, April 30th," sez me, reading from the list.

There was a moment of silence and then Midget says, in a surprised and slightly freaked-out voice, "that's my birthday."

Whoa! Minor, slightly weirded-out uproar... Too weird, especially after a rather exhausting, witchcraft-themed day... I've got to admit, my heart sank a bit. Damn! There went my newfound my-birthday's-on-a-witches'-holiday uniqueness.

Then there's a little more quiet and somebody asks, a little tentatively, "what's the other one?"

Well, by this time a pattern had started to emerged of course, and people seem a little tense, and I read off the last one, "August 1st, Lammas."

...two, three, four...

"Uh, that's my birthday," S. rex says in a slightly strangled-sounding voice.

Dead silence. Crickets chirping. Wind in the trees. Us all staring at each other. WTF?!?!?

Then a mad scramble by everybody else to grab the book and make sure I haven't been B.S.ing them, which I hadn't.

Little hard to explain what ensued. Not like a Stephen King story or H. P. Lovecraft or something in which certain dread descended on us all under the gibbous moon or anything, but we were tired and more importantly imaginative kids. I wish I could tell you that I remember exactly what it was like, but I don't. I know we were weirded out. We sat there a bit stunned for awhile, laughed about it, tried to figure out what a reasonable reaction would be like. Of the four of us present, only Boehmer ended up without a creepily cool birthday. If he had been born on Halloween, of course, we'd all have crapped our pants, but, as I recall, his birthday was sometime in July or something.

My little brother's birthday is October 27th, but that's too much of a stretch, and he wasn't even there. We decided that this would all move from being just kind of creepy to being genuinely cool if a beautiful, exotic girl born on Halloween moved to town...but that mostly had to do with girl, and not so much with the Halloween part.

So, it was a little creepy driving home that night, and a little creepy for awhile while we tried to, you know, make it really creepy. In the end, of course, it was what it was, a cool and mildy unnerving little coincidence, which would have been really, genuinely cool and freakily freakish if only Boehmer's folks had had the common decency to have him on Halloween.

Nothing, of course, ever came of it. No exotic Halloween girl ever showed up, none of the spells worked, nobody disappeared. Hell, the circus didn't even come to town, a la Ray Bradbury. But it gave us a thrill for a couple of weeks, and made for a good story. That's not much, I guess, but in Jefferson County, Missouri, you took what you could get.

So there you have it, my totally true, witchcraft-related semi-Walpurgisnacht-relevant (quasi-)adventure.

[Note that you can tell that this story is true because if I'd made it up it would be a lot cooler, and you can be sure about that.]

[Also: my guess is that somebody will be unable to resist the urge to pontificate about probabilities here. I'm well aware that co-incidental birthdays are fairly likely (about 0.3% chance of any two randomly-selected people having the same birthday). I'd have to actually, y'know, think in order to figure out how likely the above incident was. But I guess it might be the same odds as finding three pairs of co-incidental birthdays in a group of 8 people...which is way better than the odds of finding three pairs of co-incidental birthdays among a group of six people, which I guess is about 0.0027% or something(?). Actually the case here is more complicated, since it would be less cool if, say, two of us had the same birthday (e.g. Candlemas) and one of us had, say, Walpurgis Night. So we should take that into account, but, ugh, who has the energy? Anyway, I just add this because cases like this tend to bring out folks who like to pontificate about probabilities as if the rest of us are morons and such a thing never entered our pretty little heads. Actually I've never thought about trying to figure out the probabilities here precisely. Guess it might actually be worth doing. Caffeine would be required for this endeavor, however.]