Missing The Living
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
extrañar.
(Del lat.
extraneāre).
1. tr.
Desterrar a país extranjero. U. t. c. prnl.
Sometimes a particular language does not have the word that fits a feeling. I can say I miss my friend, architect Abraham Rogatnick who died five years ago. That word “miss” is not sufficient. Consider its Spanish equivalent “extrañar” defined by my on-line (the best on-line dictionary around, in my opinion) Diccionario de la lengua española - Real Academia Española. You may note that the root comes from the Latin and that it means to banish someone to a foreign country. The Spanish word to banish is desterrar (literally to remove a person from his land and forcibly send him to a foreign one).
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| Sean Rossiter |
Sometimes a particular language does not have the word that fits a feeling. I can say I miss my friend, architect Abraham Rogatnick who died five years ago. That word “miss” is not sufficient. Consider its Spanish equivalent “extrañar” defined by my on-line (the best on-line dictionary around, in my opinion) Diccionario de la lengua española - Real Academia Española. You may note that the root comes from the Latin and that it means to banish someone to a foreign country. The Spanish word to banish is desterrar (literally to remove a person from his land and forcibly send him to a foreign one).
If I say, “Extraño a
Abraham Rogatnick,” it is far more heart wrenching than to, “I miss Abraham.”
As many of my
contemporaries have become enamoured with taking pictures (sunsets and city
skylines) with their iPhones and publishing them in social media as square instagrams,
as a photographer I feel isolated and alienated (enajenado, alienāre). Those days in the 70s and 80s when I was thrilled by photographs that pushed boundaries in Saturday Night (a magazine) are but a memory.
I miss that life of
magazines, cameras, art directors and waiting to see my cover next week or next
month. It was always a fresh thrill. I miss talking shop. What is a Canon Pellix? How does it compare to a
Beseler Topcon? Should I use Agfa Rodinal or Kodak HC-110 to process my Kodak
Tri-X? When your studio lights exploded where you saved by a humble Norman 200B?
I smell sweet savours
I smell sweet savours
The Spanish equivalent
of “to miss” does add the idea of not only missing something but being out of
the realm of that which you miss. It is somehow a double whammy.
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| EA-6B Prowler |
I miss my rapidly
diminishing family, mentors and friends. I have written before that I never
broke up with former girlfriends. One dumped me in the modern parlance. I miss them for I still love them. The one who dumped me died of
cancer a few years ago. On a trip to Buenos
Aires, years before that (I was married,
she was divorced) I rang the bell to her apartment. She opened the door and
said, bluntly, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
I miss the smells of
the Argentine trains and subways. It’s that rust from wheel brakes mixed with
human urine. I miss the smell of meat being roasted in the business district of
Buenos Aires, and the smell of nixtamal wafting from the many tortilla
factories in Mexico City. I miss the smell of sewers and brine on the malecón in my mother's Veracruz. I miss her scent, Chanel No 5 or Joy. I miss the abrasion of my father's shaved face when he kissed me.
In Vancouver I love to go into Leo’s Cameras on Granville Street. The
place is familiar to me as what camera shops used to look like and smell like. When
cameras where made of metal, there was a particularly unique scent to them.I can smell that at Leo's. Leo's still sells hefty, heavy metal cameras alongside the less interesting DSLR clunkers with no soul.
I often go to our back
lane in summer to smell Rosemary’s sweet peas. I miss in my memory their smell in the now quaint gardens of my youth.
But of late I have
come to miss (extraño) friends who are not dead. They are alive in a twilight
zone. Sometimes there are moments of lucidity, but they are few and far between.
I miss my Halifax-born, 1946, friend,
journalist, Sean Rossiter who is suffering from an advanced case
of Parkinson’s. I was told today by our mutual friend, architect Alan James
that Rossiter is now in a full care facility. James asked him, “Do you want
Alex to visit you?” In a rare lucidity he immediately answered, “Yes.”
It was while watching
the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC (Rosemary and are glued to her program from 6
to 7 every afternoon) that on a US Navy Video on operations from the aircraft
carrier USS George H. W. Bush I noted the F-18s taking off. Rossiter would have
immediately told me of the variant. Both he and I would have also spotted that
ungainly (more so than the exquisite to us Grumman A6-B Intruder) Northrop/Grumman
EA-6B Prowler about to take off on its mission to jam enemy radar attached to
surface to air missile sites. We would both have told you (if you were to ask)
that this plane is rarely equipped with armament and that its role is to prevent
US fighter jets from being shot down.
I miss talking
airplanes with Rossiter. I miss his dry almost unemotional take on our city
politics which made him necessary reading for our city’s politicians when he
was writing his Vancouver Magazine column 12 & Cambie. I miss tolerating
his smoking and his controlled beer drinking at strip parlours like the Marble
Arch and Number 5 Orange.
I even miss talking
hockey with him even though I am not a hockey fan. Hockey (as I am an
Argentine-born man is an alienating sort-of-thing) is not something I enjoy.
I miss Rossiter using
that word unique to him when he liked something, “It’s sensational.”
I miss Rossiter
because he represents an era when our city awakened itself to politics and
waited from one day to the next what was going to be on the front page of a
city newspaper, a paper and ink newspaper or a magazine, put together with
staples, on a newsstand.
I miss Rossiter because we both admired our city architecture and its architects. I photographed Arthur Erickson many times to illustrate the many articles Rossiter wrote about him.
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| Abbotsford Air Show 2011 |
Best of all I miss
going with Rossiter to air shows, particularly the one on Whidbey Island Naval
Air Station where we could feast our eyes on that beautiful Grumman A-6B
Intruder. Both of us knew of its capabilities for destruction, but there was a
beauty (reminiscent in that ungainly EA-6b Prowler) of the plane as a pure
object much as in being able to relish in the shape of a Trojan or Roman
helmet.
I miss Sean Rossiter
and I will see him at his home soon. I have a feeling that if I begin a
sentence with. “I saw this Grumman EA-6B taking off…” that he will liven up
almost like in those lost times of our shared memory, a memory receding faster for one of us.
Missing the dead
Sean Rossiter - model citizen
The last Intruders by Sean Rossiter
Captain Shork's Intruder
Blue Angels in the wild blue yonder
Missing the dead
Sean Rossiter - model citizen
The last Intruders by Sean Rossiter
Captain Shork's Intruder
Blue Angels in the wild blue yonder
The Intruder - my conflict with war games
That most beautiful but ugly Intruder
Ray Spaxman, Bill Yee & All Those Other Fine Men
San Miguel de Allende, Sean Rossiter & the Cessna Citation
That most beautiful but ugly Intruder
Ray Spaxman, Bill Yee & All Those Other Fine Men
San Miguel de Allende, Sean Rossiter & the Cessna Citation
