October 9 - a special day

[fajrdrako]

Today is my mother's birthday. If she were alive still, she would be 89 years old.

I can't picture her being eighty-nine. She was sixty-seven when she died. I miss her still.

She was born October 9, 1914, which was in the middle of the Siege of Antwerp, a major battle at beginning of World War I. Not that she was anywhere near Europe at the time; she was safe in Toronto, but the family joke was that they almost named her Antwerp because of the timing. Instead they named her Margaret, after her grandmother. I never knew the people who almost named her Antwerp, and wondered, fifty years later, what it would be like to have a mother named Antwerp.

She was the best mother imaginable. I was lucky in the mother department.

It's a good day for other reasons. It's the birthday of a woman I loved very much, and will always have a fondness for. It's the birthday of John Lennon. I don't know what age he would be. It doesn't really matter. He was like my mother in that they both had original and ageless spirits.

Comments

[jfc013.livejournal.com]

FTR, John was born in 1940, and I'm vastly embarrassed to realize that I didn't remember that till I read your post just now (8:30 p.m. Central time). Must not have listened to the right radio station today!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

It's one of those dates etched in my memory. Now, whether I would remember John Lennon's birthday if it wasn't also my mother's is a different question!

[dargie.livejournal.com]

She was five days younger than my dad.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Five days - that isn't much. So he must be Libra too?

[dargie.livejournal.com]

Yup.

[cleohs.livejournal.com]

I never knew the people who almost named her Antwerp, and wondered, fifty years later, what it would be like to have a mother named Antwerp.

*g* That certainly would have been unusual! Your mother sounds so wonderful, and I loved reading your remembrance of her. It's a beautiful reminder that the people we love do stay with us, even after they're gone. :o)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

My mother was great.... The ways I like myself best are the ways I'm like her. I remember once I was sitting on suitcase by the highway in the wilds of northern Ontario north of Parry Sound, waiting for my uncle to pick me up, and a perfect stranger who had stopped for gas came over to me and said, "Are you Margaret Rice's daughter?"

"Yes," said I wondering who this could be. Turned out to be someone who had been a neighbour of some of my grandparents' friends - in Toronto, I suppose.

"You look just like her," she said. I was absurdly flattered.