EVOCATIVE CALENDAR DATES

 

Ever note the day’s date and feel there is something significant that you ought to have remembered about it, but you draw a blank?

 

This happens to me now and then, and usually it involves someone’s birthday who I have lost touch with long ago. Sometimes it’s a calendar date I made a point to remember for practical reasons, (time to turn the mattress, time to begin watering the yard, time to check on a relative who should have completed a last round of chemotherapy) but it was long ago.

 

Today’s date is an easy one for me: it celebrates the birth of a wonderful person I was lucky to have known. He left this earth, but his mark on it is alive and continues to bless many.

Happy Birthday, Abba

Our Children’s Birthdays

 

Many years ago, my mother, herself in her sixties, had a friend who was in her thirties. Her friend, of Japanese descent, told my mother that she celebrates her own birthday by giving flowers to her mother, because her mother was the one who gave birth to her on that date.

 

I asked my mother if she was telling me this because she thought it was something I (cough-cough) should do as well. My mother laughed. “Oh, no. We don’t do this,” she said. “Maybe it’s a Japanese thing?”

 

Years later, I became a mother myself. Every one of my children’s birthdays meant more to me than my own. Unlike them, I have a memory (a visceral one at that) of the original day, the day they were born. I remember it minute by minute. Both my kids' birthdays were the most monumental days in my life.

 

We don’t do the flowers thing, as my mother said. But I now get the wisdom of this tradition. Whether it was idiosyncratic or a cultural thing, it evokes a sense of awe.