Today is my mother's birthday. She died ten a little over years ago at age 80.
Although I never considered myself a mama's boy, for many years thoughts of her death were so fresh they brought only solemn sadness. Now that's faded a little, though I'm still respectful of her and the life she lived. Today, while writing in a journal I write in every morning, I found myself forgetting to capitalize "Mom" when using the word as a proper noun. Later, when emailing a friend who shares my sense of humor, I wrote that my mother would have been 91 today if not for a tragic skydiving accident.
I'm glad I've lived long enough that her memory has balance. She's still a daily presence in my life, but not one that saps joy.
In the photo she's recovering from a bad cold. The boy in bed is her big brother, who I'm named after, home on leave from the Marines. The nation is on the cusp of entering World War II. The newspaper she has is The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, which went out of business in 1982 after a run of 135 years. For years it had the largest circulation of any evening newspaper in America, during a time when there were many. (People my age can tell it's that paper by the two-column wide spread of comics on the back page of one section.)
It looks like a happy day for her. No school because of her cold, warm in bed with the newspaper, Tip Top Magazine, with its stories and puzzles, her big brother, a Marine fly boy. Both she and her brother with a vast number of years ahead of them, not knowing, of course, that they would die less than a month apart in fall of 2011.
The photo would have been taken by her father, who died six years before I was born.
