Remembering my mother, in honour of her birthday… March 27,1918
Angelina Elizabeth “Jill” McBryde (née Reiser) 1918-2001
Resident of Georgetown from 1955 until 1964
An active member of the St. John’s United Church congregation, my mother also worked as a secretary for the Reverend Ian Fleming from about 1961 until 1964.
Her office looked onto the upper schoolyard of Chapel Street Public School, so she was able to keep an eye on my sister and me during recess and playtime.
Angelina McBryde would today be known as a master gardener. Our yard on Elizabeth Street featured luxuriant flower beds, teeming fruit trees, and a thriving vegetable garden.
Each year, she would win multiple prizes for her flowers during the Georgetown Fall Fair.
My mother, Angelina Reiser, was born in 1918 of parents who had very recently arrived in Canada from their native Poland and had settled in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where they eked out a subsistence living on a hard-scrabble farm, raising eight children in the process. Although of Polish extraction, Mom was plagued by the Reiser name for she was dubbed a German at a time when first the Kaiser and then Adolf Hitler made anything resembling a Teutonic moniker a distinct liability. So it was that she became known as Jill Raseur, Raizor, or Razor and strove to hide her origins by becoming more English Canadian than Prime Minister William Lyon McKenzie King. When she married my father in 1945, she nominally shed the Reiser legacy, a process already undertaken through her pursuit of higher education while her sisters dropped out of school early in search of marital bliss.
When my sister and I were “growing up absurd” in the small town of Georgetown, Ontario, in the 1950s and 1960s, Mom struggled mightily to align with the prototype of benevolent suburban maternity, sporting bulbous bouffant hairstyles and serving up classic convenience foods, such as tasteless Minute Rice, garishly orange Cheese Wiz, sodden steakettes, mushy instant mashed potatoes, and desiccated fish sticks, my own personal favourite. In short, Mom did her best to help us fit in….and to fit in herself.
In the immortal words of Oscar Wilde, my parents’ relationship was “a divorce made in heaven,” at a time when conjugal rupture – or rapture – was barely an option. They in fact remained shackled to one another “until death did them part,” almost 57 years to be exact.
My mother was devoted to her children.
Here is just one striking memory of Mom:
I was about eleven years old and we were out for a walk in Georgetown’s Remembrance Park on a glorious early October day, with the crisp fall weather and the luminescent leaves providing a propitious setting for a gentle, informative chat. My mother’s thoughtful narrative about “the birds and bees” served as an antidote to the vile dross and discomfiting innuendo propagated in the schoolyard and on tv. Her story soothed the night terrors of my childhood and has remained a balm ever since.
And here are some short sketches in which my mother is featured:
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
