Photos for Headline Surfer® / If she were alive today, she'd be 75 years old. She died 11 years ago on Aug. 27, on my Dad's birthday. It's also the same birthday as my wife Serafina's mother.
There are two other people in my family whose birthdays are in October along with my mother: My brother Joel (Oct. 6, 1963 ) and my 21-year-old son, Henry IV (Oct. 16, 1993).
My mother, Anna Marie Moreira, was born on Oct. 30, 1939, in Day Kimball Hospital in Putnam, Conn. She was one year younger than my father, Henry Frederick, Jr.
Today is kind of a bittersweet day because my mother has been gone for 11 years now. She and my father moved to Central Florida a year before her passing, but they didn't like it and moved back a few months later.
My mother's fondest memory here in place that was foreign to her small-town lifestyle back home was throwing pieces of bread to the turtles in the pond in the Port Orange City Center.
That was her favorite spot because it was so serene. This was not her home. It was mine, 1,500 miles from where we grew up and frequented, along the border towns of Northeastern Connecticut like Putnam, Thompson, Woodstock and Killingly and Massachusetts towns like Southbridge, Sturbridge, Webster, Dudley, Oxford and Auburn. Occasionally, Worcester.
She was raised and spent her life in the "Quiet Corner" of Northeastern Connecticut, her childhood in the Killingly vollage of Attawaugan.
In her younger days, while raising seven of us kids and working in the local factories with my Dad, she followed national politics, often clipping out stories and taping them into a scrap book.
She followed Watergate very closely and knew of many of the players. She was fascinated by the earlier JFK assassination, too. Mostly, her life was devoted to God, her husband and the seven children she bore.
There were no favorites.
Perhaps she took a greater interest in me academically because like her, I was so inquisitive. She taught me how to read and write when I was 3. By the time I was in first grade, I was already reading books and writing not only in complete sentences, but paragraphs, too. These early building blocks to a longstanding award-winning career in journalism I credit to my mom.
Perhaps she took a greater interest in me academically because like her, I was so inquisitive. She taught me how to read and write when I was 3. By the time I was in first grade, I was already reading books and writing not only in complete sentences, but paragraphs, too. These early building blocks to a longstanding award-winning career in journalism I credit to my mom.
My mother was always proud of my work in school, especially college. I was the first on both sides of my family to fo to colleger and graduate (BA, political scinve, 1984, Central Connecticut State University). Then my three younger sisters -- Gina, Anna and Paula -- followed with college educations, all of which pleased my mother, especially.
She and my father were there for my graduation and she loved it when I'd mail her copies of my stories early in my career. The end was tough, flying back and forth several times in 2003, where she was hospitalized for several weeks at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut before she left us.
Life got really tough after her death from a heart attack and open heart surgery that held little hope for any kind of life. I was the last of my family to say good-bye to her.
The next year, I lost my job at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, despite all the hard work and a seemingly endless stream of journalism industry awards -- more than any other reporter. Then I went through a divorce and struggled as a single father raising a son in his early teens.
Life got better, though.
I met my new wife, Serafina, in 2008, and that year, with her help, I fulfilled a dream by launching the 24/7 internet newspaper, first as NSBNews.net and then as HeadlineSurfer.com under the registered trademark of Headline Surfer®. The next year we were mrried on the beach.
Just like my 8 1/2 years at the Daytona paper, the journalism awards began piling up: First up were three blogs by my former business partner Peter Mallory in 2011. Then in 2012, I won awards for nine of my stories plus three blogs and top Internet site. In 2013, I won awards for six more stories. And earlier this week, I won awards for six more stories, all from the highly competitive Florida Press Club, the only statewide journalism contest.
Those who know me really well or have gotten to know me say they admire my confidence, back by hard work, and my ability to "bring it" with the raw style of journalism that has been my calling card for the better part of 30 years; from those early days at the small community papers in Connecticut to the big suburban newspaper (The Journal-News) outside New York City to my tenure here in Central Florida since the mid-1990s.
A lot of that self-confidence comes from my mother while the fire in the belly comes from my father.
Henry Frederick, raised in a close-knit blue collar family, learned how to read and write when he was 3 years old. He was taught by his late mother, Anna Frederick, whose birthday is Oct. 30.At 52, I sometimes worry about my own mortality -- especially after a scare in August when I was overcome by smoke and spent four days in August hospitalized in the ICU in Sanford.
My mother was called home to God just two months shy of her 63rd birthday.
This is something I've accepted over time as life goes on for the living.
Like my mother, if I were to die today, I feel like my life would have been worth something. I know for my mother, her life, meant a lot to her husband and her children.
Perhaps her passing was a wake-up call for the rest of us to appreciate what we have and the people closest to us in our lives; what we mean to each other.
My mother's father died at the age of 40 when she was 12, but her mother lived into her mid-90s. My father's father died at 69, but he wmoked and had emphysema. His mother lived into her lte 80s and he's now 76, and rides a Harley.
And though she has been dead for 11 years, my mother lives within me through the memories of my childhood through college and as a family man with a career and responsibilities of my own.
I'm happy my mother lived to see my son grow from a baby into a good boy. The first time I took him to her gravesite in the Grove Street Cemetery in Putnam, Conn., he looked at the marker and then he began to cry. He was 10 years old. That was half a lifetime ago to him. But to me, it still feels like it was yesterday.
And so I close with this: Happy Birthday Mom. I love you and I miss you.