Beware the Ides of March


I've got a birthday coming up.  A big one:  65.  My birthday is March 15th, the Ides of March.

 

 

 

An almost birthday selfie.  Me, in my studio today.  

 


Funny, when I was a little girl, I'd never heard of the Ides of March.  I was sorry not to have been born two days later, on March 17th, St. Patrick's Day.  I wanted my birthday to be a national holiday. 

 


I remember asking Daddy if there wasn't something special about March 15th.  Wasn't it some kind of holiday? I asked.


"March 15th is 'Lincoln Tax Day'" he responded, with an immediacy that seemed authoritative.  

 


I went to school and started bragging about having been born on 'Lincoln Tax Day.'  My 3rd grade classmates looked puzzled, but were polite.

 


I'm embarrassed to report that I repeated that Lincoln Tax Day nonsense for a few years.  It wasn't until I was in high school and studying William Shakespeare that I heard the phrase 'The Ides of March.'

 


 "Beware the Ides of March,'  is probably the best known line from Shakespeare's great tragedy about Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar, the second emperor of Rome, was, in fact, stabbed to death by Brutus on the floor of the Roman Senate on the Ides of March in 44 BC.

 


And just this morning, scouring the internet, I gleaned another interesting little historical factoid about my birthday, March 15, 1952. On that date, a world record setting rain fell over La Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean:  73.26 inches in 24 hours.

 


That's a coincidence.  When I was in my twenties, my friend, Doug, plotted my horoscope.  I was, Doug said, the wateriest person he'd ever met. Everything in my chart, sun, planets, and moon, were in water signs.



I wasn't surprised.  I feel like a watery spirit: fluid, changeable, unfixed. And even as a child in the Secret City, I was a deep diver, ever pondering the big questions, a worrier who was no stranger to oceans of tears. 


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Be Well and Good Luck,

Martha Maria 

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