Niño & Niña

At age 76 I know we must travel before travel insurance for the both of us become onerous. Yesterday (I am writing this February 19), a few hours before we were to leave for the airport, Rosemary decided to purchase insurance. I had to answer all kinds of questions on what seems to have been an infinity of possible diseases. In the end I am insured. I told the woman on the phone that since we were traveling to Italy the premium should have been double because of bureaucracy. But she had no sense of humour and I left it at that.

I put Niño and Niña in their cage and took them with all their blankets, food and food dishes to the Feline Hilton. There I was told I had to have the cats vaccinated for this and that. I had no choice but to give my assent.

Niño in particular looked at me with big mournful eyes a sort of, “Why are you doing this?”

I have stated before that somehow a cat in its essential catness reinforces our own personal humanity. Niño and Niña make compel me to feel more human, more caring and more forgiving.

As I drove back I felt myself hoping that the days in Italy were almost over and I could turn the car and pick them up. They say that cats, lacking clocks, have no idea of the passage of time. I am not too sure. Will they think of us while we are gone? Who knows?

But we will have them in our thoughts every day of our trip. Chances are that our next trip will not be one that comes soon.

 

Niño - Photograph Rosemary Waterhouse-Hayward

When we moved to our lovely Kerrisdale corner home with a large garden we spent a little fortune in buying the best plants money could buy. We went to Maple Ridge and other places to find beautiful antiques. Our house made it in Better Homes and Gardens and in several Canadian gardening magazines.

But we never worried too much about the upstairs until the plumbing began to fail. Suddenly we had leaky bathrooms and no money in the bank for repairs. It was embarrassing because we could never invite anybody (friends or relatives) to stay with us.

We finally sold over the objection of my Rosemary and bought a neat, clean duplex in Kitsilano which our younger granddaughter Lauren says is cozy.

The heating is electric and I cough much less. We have floor heating in the tiled floors of the kitchen and the bathrooms. Everything works including a toilet much too complicated for me to figure out. We still use toilet paper.

And then two months ago we had a slow leak in the kitchen. We found a plumber who did not tear up the whole kitchen to find the leak.

A long story short is that our insurance is pretty well changing more than half the kitchen.

Two days before we packed for our trip to Venice they removed the cabinets and counters. Luckily we have a stove and microwave. But there is no kitchen sink so I have been washing dishes in the downstairs guest bathroom. Our pots and pans and dishes are all on the dining room table.

It is chaos.

And since they are not going to do the dry wall and other repairs we will return to chaos.

The travails of traveling in the 21^st century are an unsavory challenge. We need the cubes and the wires to charge Rosemary’s iPhone7, my Galaxy S5 and for my dedicated only camera iPhone3G. I need to pack a charger for my two Fuji X cameras. Because one of my swivel lens panoramics, a Horizont will be loaded with Kodak B+W Infrared Film I need to take a changing bag.

Because I plan to photograph my cello playing friend Claudio Ronco I am taking a light that adjusts from 110 to 220. But I cannot forget the plug in cord and the Italian outlet adaptor. And without a flash cord and an adaptor to connect it to onë of my Fujis I need the adaptor. My Minolta Flash Meter is coming too as well as a small soft box and collapsible light stand.

Not knowing how dishonest someone might amidst the throngs of Venice I am bringing a “faltriquera” which is worn underneath my pant waist. I will put a few Euros there.

Rosemary needs all sorts of cream and makeup. She insists on bringing two Eyewitness Books, one is on Venice the other is on Florence. In my shoulder camera bag (it does not look like one) I am packing Dickens’s book on his travels in Italy as well as Ruskin’s the Stones of Venice. Rosemary will slip into her shoulder bag Vidal in Venice.

The cage for Niño and Niño is ready. I will take them in the morning. We feel guilty and would like to suddenly be back from our trip.

It might snow on Tuesday. We have already booked our cab to the airport just in case they will be hard to come by in the morning.

We are trying to empty the fridge. The combination of food we have been having in the last few days defies any standard of culinary compatibility.

As I ready myself to sleep (Rosemary is getting up at five to call Blue Cross travel insurance on her iPhone) I know I will be restless. My Niño will get on top of me on the bed and look at me with mournful eyes. I know what he is thinking.

“Why are you abandoning us?

And yes, three batteries for the Fujis as well as spare storage cards. And the film.

When Rosemary and I arrive in Venice on the 20th I will have the ghosts (images) of the many books I have read about Venice. Some have been novels others non-fiction. But there will be a ghost that will be with me all the time. It is a 19^th century photograph by a mostly forgotten Venetian photographer called Girolamo Clemente. From what I can gather he died at age 35 in 1875. I am haunted by this lovely image of a woman he called Buenaventura. Who was she? I will never know. But perhaps I can find someone to pose for me in homage to this woman.

I may have 40, mostly old roses in my garden. In our Kerrisdale garden we had 85. Some died. Some were taken by enthusiastic gardeners. Some of the hardy Gallicas went to my daughter Ale who lives in dessert cold and dessert heat Lillooet.

But since 2002 I have scanned all the roses we ever had or have and many of Rosemary’s perennials. These high resolution scans are safely backed up.

How do I feel about these long gone roses?  I believe I feel the same sense of loss as I do of my dead friends and relatives. Of my friend and relatives I retain memories that are reinforced by photographs.

In the parlance of this digital century, photographers capture their images with their cameras. Have I in some way captured a tad of the uniqueness and essence of my roses?

The rose here  (not a scan but a photograph) came from a Langley friend with no confirmed name to it. Because of its look I named it (for myself) Rosa ‘Blowsy’. I have no idea if Blowsy is in our old garden. But I look at these images and I must smile on a cloudy February 18 as we get ready for our trip to Italy.

Because I like to associate stuff I immediately did so with Blowsy and my friend (have no idea where she is now) Salem.

My architect friend Abraham Rogatnick who died some 7 years ago used to tell me,”I am not long for this world and I am glad of it.” I understood then and more so now.

Consider that my Microsoft Word program  questions the use of the work Ektachrome. More than half of the cars that I could at once recognize with but a glance are gone. When I look at the celebrities in my NY Times or even the Vancouver Sun I have no idea who they are.

While I cannot brag that I used to walk miles to my school when I was a little boy, whatever else I might want to brag about  (since it will be pre-digital revolution) will be of no importance.

As that not-too-polite English young man in a photography class I gave some years ago said to me, “Can you show us photographs of people in magazines that still exist?”

So when two intrepid photographers (and you have to be intrepid to be one these days), Robert Kwong and Ralph Rinke called me up to ask me if I could be visited, I jumped at the offer. They were here yesterday and for three hours my Vancouver isolation in things photographic dissipated. Over Spanish Alhambra Beer we talked of things that nobody these days would understand. Such as HC-110, Dektol, Technical Pan and, on and on.

Bless these two from saving me for at least three hours.

So here you have some lousy snow pictures that I took today. Can I justify them?

I think I can.

My Rosemary and I are on our way to Venice next week. I am participating in this group show. My wife has been there before. Millions have been there. Soon it will be millions & one when I show up. How can I possibly take pictures with some sort of originality?

Jeff Gin at Leo’s Camera contributed (at a very good price) part of a LensBaby that has different black disks with from small to large size f-stop openings.  I chose the almost wide open f-2.8 disc. I took pictures of the scene outside our Kerrisdale house today featuring our 2017 Chevrolet Cruze. I believe that these pictures are indeed lousy but they show that perhaps the f-4 disc might be a better bet to take some “dreamy” shots of Venice with the Fuji X-E1. With the Fuji X-E3 I will be using its panoramic stitching capability and in particular for vertical panoramics.

But I am taking two more cameras that use film. One is a Japanese swivel lens panoramic called a Widelux which I will load with 160 ISO Kodak colour negative film. The other camera (as seen here) is a Russian Horizont swivel lens panoramic. The deep red filter seen in the middle is an indication that I will be loading it with the long discontinued and most wonderful Kodak B+W Infrared Film.

I have been reading John Ruskins’s The Stones of Venice, Charles  Dickens’s book on his trip to Italy, Henry James’s Italian Hours and Gore Vidal’s Vidal in Venice. My idea is to illustrate evocative passages in those books with my photographs.




What the Dickens?