On my fifteenth Leap Day

Of fathers on the record

Two men I celebrate in my acknowledgement of the significance of today, Joel Adebambo Idowu, my maternal grandfather who passed on in May 1961 and Josiah Olubadejo Akintayo, my father, who at a sprightly 84 years old, potters around with energy and wisdom in our hometown, Ìjẹ̀shà Ìjèbú, in Ogun State.

They were both archivists journalling the histories and genealogies of our little town which bears the historical name of Òdo Àyányẹlú and is significant in the Ijebuland monarchy as well as the animist Agẹmọ cult that represents the 16 masquerades or priests in the August festivals at the palace of the Awùjalẹ̀ of Ìjèbú Òde.

Blog - The Agemo Traditions of Ijebuland - A Primer (November 2013)

In the journals of the annals

However, within the drafts of the documentation my father did over decades of research and study, I found some interesting stuff about age grades, a 3-year grouping with fantastic names that allowed those born in our town to be represented amongst their peers. In which you only needed to know the age grade name and who belonged where to ascertain within the margin of 3 years, the age of anyone so referenced.

The age grade information starting from around the end of the 19^th Century went back two to three generations before mine, my own paternal great-grandmother on his mother’s side greatly outlived all her peers by the time she passed on. The kind of rapport she and I had was utterly friendly and extensive conversation. People could not understand how or why we got on so well.

Leaping into new age grades

In this leap year, I celebrate my 15^th Leap Day and it portends that those born from the 1^st of March 1964 to the 29^th of February 1968 belong in this artificially interesting leap day and year group. One of my former managers to whom I would attribute such lasting influence in my career was born the day before this date range and that would either make him 16 leap years old or an inductee into the Diamond Jubilee cohort. I wish him well.

Obviously, a 4-year time frame can be quite a lengthy time to consider people's age mates or peers. Still, it presents another dimension to our view of time, the passage of it, and how we reckon it relates to the people we encounter from the past in the stories we are told or the journals they have written, in the present as we recollect the memories of our youth, where we are now and our hopes for the future, and conclusively, the kinds of legacies we want to lay out for the future.

Meanwhile, how many leap days have you seen?

In the absent books of writhe

The un-chronicling of naughty

“You’re a naughty boy”, that’s something I had heard many times from when I was a boy and even so now that I am someone’s lover boy. With that comes the threat of something one might or might not enjoy, but that is left to be seen and felt.

Apparently, there is a journal, a mythical black book with fictional ideas of what a naughty boy has done, written in invisible ink, one would suppose because evidence of all that is as scant as watching the divinations of a shaman, for only they can see whatever they see and interpret what is not within the purview of the supplicant.

It could be put down to the usual banter the jousting between a black book with blank pages, then again; if the pages were black, what is written therein might not be seen but for the sake of highly fluorescent ink against the fact that the evident notepad with a pen always within reach and the propensity to tap away at a keyboard to produce a blog.

Maybe it is not a contest, just a whimsical notion of readiness and lethargy, no winners to celebrate, just that naughty is all part of a spectacle, present with many and left to fester by some. Then, rather than call someone else a naughty boy, history came crashing in with an excellently deployed putdown, along the lines of before your cheeky face appeared. That should leave some chuckling with a naughty giggle.