My friend, Bruce Wertz, often reminds me of the Frank Sinatra song (or movie), “A pocketful of miracles,” but in Bruce’s case it’s “A pocketful of trivia.”
Yes, after church, during treat time, he’ll hand me a soon-to-be raisin and ask why John Steinbeck would have anything to do with it. Before I attempt an answer, he blurts out, “It’s a Grape of Wrath.”

Two weeks ago, he wished me “a happy Ides of March . . and happy pie day.” The Ides of March is a no-brainer; we need to beware of the day Brutus and his gang of rabble-rousers assassinated Julius Caesar.

But pie day? Oh! He means pi, as in 3.147. Bruce wasn’t making it up: There is a pi day, observed in several big cities and universities. It’s ideally suited for nerdish mathematicians.

It’s simple. Let’s say you have a perfect circle one inch across. Without cutting it, can you tell how long (circumference) will be? The answer is 3.147 inches.
Now there are clearly many more applications for pi, and even leading mathematicians claim that the fraction (3-1/7) or the decimal (3.147) really doesn’t end. You could spend the day trying to find the final digit.

Some people, when challenged to explain pi, simply say, “Let’s just forget about it. Let’s go have some pie. I like pecan.” Others throw pies at one another. The city of Princeton, N.J., hosts several events which combine Pi Day with the birthday of Albert Einstein, also March 14. And it’s fitting that since Einstein lived in Princeton for about 20 years, his memory ought to be celebrated.
It was a few years ago when people started regarding Pi Day as a working holiday. It didn’t take long to choose a day for it. If pi equals 3.14, it makes sense to make March 14 Pi Day.

Pi Day isn’t the only occasion for merriment among those who have too much time on their hands. There’s also Square Root Day, created by Ron Gordon, a California high school teacher. To review: The square root of 9 is 3 (3 times 3); the square root of 16 is 4 (4 times 4), etc. Some square root merrymakers observe this unofficial holiday by calculating days in which both the day of the month and the month are the square root of the last two digits of the year.

For example, the latest Square Root Day came on March 3, 2009. We have the third day of the third month, meaning 3 times 3 equal the nine in 2009. The next such occasion with be April 4, 2016.

Even more revelers might be interested in observing Square Root Day by eating diced carrots or other square root vegetables as part of a square meal.

I must have been napping when fellow journalist Ben Moffett reminded his Facebook friends about “four great consecutive holidays” which have just passed. They are (were) Pi Day, The Ides of March, then 3.16, which Moffett calls “a religious holiday of some note, written by the Biblical author John, not John the Baptist, but the other John”; and finally, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, “the day Pete chased all the snakes out of Ireland.”

I admit that this pi-square root-birthday treatise ought to have been published two weeks ago, when it was timely. However, like half the New Mexico population, it’s taken me days to wake up and make up for that lost hour when we switched to daylight saving time.

Notice how it wasn’t only our state legislature that slept through the last two weeks. A lot of us did too.

Our time is fine the way it is. Yes, there’s a freshman legislator in the state who tried to keep daylight saving time in effect all year — and forever. But it seems our elected officials forgot to wind their own clocks and therefore never got around to addressing the proposal.

I’m glad we can keep time exactly the way it is now.

• • •

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a neighbor boy and classmate at Immaculate Conception School who’d knock on our back door on his way to school, asking for a shortcut. How many millions of steps did Johnny Lopez save that way? Of course, when two days in a row he needed to make a pit stop in our restroom, I wondered about his true intentions.

We usually walked to school together. He moved on after high school, but the legend lived on. At family gatherings, a ring of the doorbell often has prompted one of us to say, “That must be Johnny.”

The visits of years earlier took on a life of their own, and we were tempted to regard Johnny’s visits the same way John Nichols personified El Brazo Onofre (the missing arm of a man named Onofre) in Nichols’ novel, The Milagro Beanfield War. Remember, any mischief that occurred was usually blamed on the missing limb.

• • •

Drop-by visits on the way to school weren’t only a Trujillo phenomenon. Jose Maestas said his childhood home on Eighth and Dalbey often became an oasis that attracted a crowd.

The Maestas family was large, with each child more popular than all the others: Martin, Benny, Lucy, Katherine, Mike, Beatrice, Jose and Helen. And each of them had schoolmates their own age who congregated at the Maestas home on the way to school, keeping warm as they waited for the bus.

True, at the Maestas home there was an occasional request to use the restroom, but, Jose surmises, a whiff of his mother’s fresh-baked bread was the real lure. The Maestas mom often baked an extra loaf of bread when she suspected there would be an invasion by neighbor schoolmates.