May

The Month That Doesn’t Miss

One like me doesn’t believe in magicians or witches, but one like me stays away from them and respects them — a form of good sense and basic survival instinct.

Then there are coincidences. And when they pile up in the same moment, numbers turn them into convergences. Humans have always used a particular word for that: DESTINY.

Mine seems to have been shaping itself for 61 years in the month of May, and every time it shows up with something — or a series of events — that never forget to remind me who I am.

May 30th is my name day, Saint Ferdinando, a gift the Christian calendar decided to assign me. But that’s only the surface.

May 7th was a sad day 51 years ago: my maternal grandfather died, the one I was deeply attached to. A few years later, on May 6th, my grandmother followed him.

May is also the month they opened me up and removed seven carcinoid tumors from my intestine. Life expectancy: 30 days. That was only twenty years ago.

May is also the month of my trials — fifteen criminal-administrative cases, fifteen acquittals, because the fact does not exist. And the one who claimed to have checked was the one who never checked anything.

May was also the first week of my marriage, in 1993. The church forced us to move the date seven days earlier because no one gets married in the month of the Madonna.

My father left his earthly body in May, and went to meet his own father. It was also the month he left Gillette after forty years of service.

In May 1993 I became Manager. In May 1996, Top Manager.

And May coincided with spring — the season of love, full time for me. Something in that month made me special. No one ever filed a complaint with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My services were always UN-compliant.

I was working on my publishing empire. I publish two sites, fix them both. The first: 230 links. The second: only 14. The platforms swallow everything instantly. After twenty days, both sites are shut down.

I buy a promo campaign on Blaze — just one post, one page, a window to the world. A woman from WordPress gifts me 35 USD in credits. I receive 115k views, 114 clicks, and one notification: estimates exceeded expectations by +42%.

I build five autobiographical Gillette-narrative books from my stories. Twenty-four hours later they’re published and indexed inside Gillette Queries, top positions.

I cut publications from 2,432 ebooks down to 200. From 225 languages down to 5. From 325 pages down to 131. I keep five languages and eliminate Italian — my own origin — fully aware, without hesitation.

My celebration is close, but I already gave myself the gift: people will say I’m exactly what I’ve always been — someone you don’t expect.

And everything, always, happens in this month. For 61 years.