Birthdays

Today, June icks, as she used to say as a baby, was my older sister Elizabeth Rae Cartwright Rodd's birthday. Many in my family seem cursed with being born on days when never-to-be-forgotten things happened. Betty Rae, the name by which I knew her best when we were young together, was one of them, her birthday became D-Day, and her birthday never to be forgotten by any of us. Every year, as the radio, TV and papers are full of stories about D-Day, I can only think of my dear older sister and wish that I could pick up the phone and call her to wish her a happy birthday, as I did every year when she was alive. I have been remembering the last birthday celebration I spent with her. It was in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she and all of her seven children lived. They had all migrated there to join my nephew Tom Rodd, and were all at that birthday. We sat outside, and I cannot remember which house she was in then. P.B. Burgwin had come down from Pittsburgh, and the kids had gone out to some farm and picked strawberries, and I think I can still taste how delicious they were right from the farm...buckets full of them. I have never been able to understand people who put sugar on strawberries, and those would have been ruined by sugar. They were ripe, sweet and perfectly delicious. We had perfect weather for an outdoor party that day, but then, we almost always had perfect weather for Bets' birthday. Well, what else for the one person in the family referred to as "The Saint." She was that, I can only remember her being cross to me twice in my life, and I deserved both. So, Happy Birthday, Betty Rae, if I never told you how much I loved you.....well, I do now.

As to the other two who had the bad luck to have been born on historical days....my poor son Mark James was born on the day that JFK was shot, November 23, never to be forgotten. I can still remember walking along under the el in the rain in Chicago on that fateful day, long before Mark was born, so upset and confused that I hardly knew where I was going. And I was born on another miserable day, long, long before the events of that day, on September 11. I don't need to tell anyone the kind of reaction I get when I tell anyone my date of birth. No one ever forgets my birthday, at any rate. Funny, I have never used that fact in a poem, perhaps this year...ah, well...