November 11, 2013
Monday

It’s Veterans (or maybe Veterans’, but certainly not Veteran’s) Day in the United States. I have traditionally used the plural possessive, calling it “Veterans’ Day,” the day that belongs to veterans. I have learned recently, from Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty, that the official rendering of the name of the observance is Veterans Day. In a piece she wrote in 2010, she discusses how both “Veterans Day” and “Veterans’ Day” are grammatically correct. It’s an interesting discussion (if you find that sort of thing interesting), and has allowed me to write almost 100 words of original (albeit not very interesting) content before I direct my readers to work I have posted before.

November 11 presents two personal memorials. My father served in the Army in World War II, in a noncombatant role, teaching English to Puerto Rican recruits. He had met my mother a year or so before he left. They became engaged when he returned, and were married in 1946. He sometimes said that he regretted the delay in their marriage, since it meant they passed up certain financial and other benefits that would have been afforded to dependents. But it also means that their first child would likely have been born in 1944, and the person sitting here typing this now would, if she existed at all, be a different person with a different history.

My father died in 1985, a day after their 39th anniversary. My mother endured a grief-filled widowhood of nearly eight and a half years. She died twenty years ago today, November 11, 1993. She was a postman’s daughter, and the post offices were closed that day, as they had been the day she was born February 13, 1911, in observance of Lincoln’s birthday.

I’ve written about both of these things — my father’s service and my mother’s death — in this space at this time before. Should there ever be a “best of” compilation of my blog posts, they will be among the selections. Enjoy them again, now, and thank you for reading, so much, so often.

A Eulogy for My Mother and Veterans’ Day.

Ludwig and Rose Yakimoff
November 8, 1975
(my father was one month shy of 59, my mother was 64)