That was the warning Julius Caesar heard from the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Well, today is March 15th, the Ides of March, and checking out the meaning I found out it had to do with ancient divisions of time. But to me there is a completely different meaning: today would have been both the birthday of my father and my parents’ anniversary. Growing up, that was a double simcha in our family for celebration. When I heard about the negative implication of the date I asked my parents, and my father gave me his usual brush-off guttural sound (you may remember it from my talk about his time in Dachau and as a U.S. soldier) …” ACH!”

Now get ready for a major leap forward…

Today is also the birthday of Kevin Youkilis, a Jewish Major League Baseball player of Romanian and Greek ancestry. Youkilis who played for the Boston Red Sox had been sitting in the dugout on August 8, 2005 but was called to play in the ninth inning. He set a record for the most Jewish ball players on the field at one time in the American League and the most in Major League History since four Jewish players took the field for the New York Giants of the National League exactly 80 years ago. (Be still my beating heart!).

I actually have a connection to that last statistic. Aside from the fact that I lived a mile from the Polo Grounds, the home of the Giants until they moved to San Francisco, I met the daughter of one of those four players who came for a Bar Mitzvah of the son of congregants. She told me that her father never told a soul he was Jewish because of the antisemitism in the sport, yet it came out anyway. The shock of it all was that he had three other Jewish teammates, none of whom knew the others were Jewish!

From Julius Caesar to the Grumbachers to Kevin Youkilis of the Red Sox to the New York Giants. Sometimes I cannot get over how filled with trivia this brain of mine is!

“Beware the ides of March!” Ach!!!