These ladder days

Today a young child told me, apropos of nothing, that her birthday is January 16. She repeated the date several times. Randomly saying that in the middle of May is unusual.

When I went into my study I saw that, now that Child of Fortune had been removed from the top of a stack of books, the book on top was now The Secret Language of Birthdays. As discussed in "Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes" (January 21), it has a picture and title for each day of the year, and the picture for my own birthday is a ladder.

Seeing that book just after being randomly informed of a January 16 birthday, I turned to that date just out of curiosity. The picture also includes a ladder.

I'm not sure what the coincidence means, if anything, but it's my general policy to note and publish such things.