On the eve of Halloween, a brief story about reincarnation

My father always told me that as he left the hospital after I was born, the newspaper headlines were that Franklin Roosevelt had died. He said his greatest fear was that I might be the reincarnation of Roosevelt.

So I spent much of my young life thinking that I was born on the day that Roosevelt died. I did even consider that Roosevelt might have died in the night while I was born the next morning.

At any rate, it is probably remarkable that my father, not just a scientist, but a physicist, spoke to me this way about reincarnation. It gave me a basis for considering reincarnation seriously, which I did at various times in my life, which is a topic for another day.

At some point, perhaps as a teen or in my early 20's, I decided to look up the death of Franklin Roosevelt. You can imagine my surprise to find that he did not die the day before or on my birthday. He died the day after I was born! Apparently, my father was in the hospital so long that the time merged into one day.