October 9 - a special day

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.