No Eggs! No Eggs!
Friday, October 31, 2014
And she bare him a
son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a
strange land.
Exodus 2:22
I had a mentor friend in Mexico City who died in his 80s a year ago. Raúl Guerrero Montemayor 9 years after I met him was a witness to my wedding in 1968 to my Rosemary in Coyoacán, Mexico. Raúl spoke at least 8 languages and he could do stuff like speaking Spanish with a Filipino or Yiddish. He was supposed to be of Filipino origin but he was blonde, with blue eyes and always pointed out to us that he was first cousin to actress Yvette Mimieux.
If you had asked, as I
did many times, what nationality he claimed to be of he would answer in
Spanish, “Soy híbrido.” Somehow that does not translate to English as, “I am a
hybrid.” as I think of some exotic variant of a species plant. In many respects
I understood Raúl’s definition of what he was in a Borgesian term, “I am all of
them but none of them.”
Yesterday I read
Borges’s short story Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz . Unless you are an
Argentine who has read José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (one of the quite a few
Argentine novels, actually an epic poem that defined the nation) the story
would be close to meaningless. Feeling alone in my bed (even though Rosemary
was next to me with her NY Times) I felt Argentine but in the isolation of
knowing that unless I skyped someone in Buenos
Aires, my experience in reading this story was one
that I could not share. I felt a stranger in this strange land that is Canada and from the vantage point of Vancouver.
And yet…
Much in our thoughts
as we prepare our garden for the winter is wondering how many of these fall
cleanups are meant to be. Will this be the last one? I will not deny that as
our bank funds dissolve to nothing the great value of our house is a constant
reminder that we could soon be living in a small shelter where all the
bathrooms (two?) would work and the tub would not leak and the kitchen would
not have a white Ikea floor, and the furnace would be efficient, and mice would
not invade our basement in the fall to die and stink up my darkroom, and the
wooden floors (the nice wooden floors would not longer worry us about their
fading), and we would not fear as to what tree might fall on our house in that
night windstorm, or about getting Casi-Casi inside before 9pm because of the marauding
coyotes or racoons…
But we would not live
in White Rock. It would be too far for us to consider going to a concert, or
ballet or theatre; our grandchildren would be far away in Vancouver and that tunnel and traffic would
be an obstacle. Would we end up playing bridge with people our age and discussing "doing" Machu Picchu? North Van would make us say,” I cannot do this or that until
the lanes change.” Perhaps Burnaby (our return to
Burnaby) would involve a Lougheed Highway or an East
Hastings that would be trifle less congested than the freeway to
Coquitlam and points beyond.
Mexico,
the warmth of Mexico
could beckon. One of the nicest spots on earth is the city of Mérida, Yucatán which has fewer Americans
(that’s good!) than San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato. But Mérida would not
provide us with a daily delivered NY Times, and a ready supply of constant 110
voltage. Then there are those hurricanes. And I wonder how we would manage to get
our monthly supply of pills that keep both of us this side of 70 even though we
are that side of it. And the political instability of Mexico would be
a constant worry as being away from the presence of our daughters and granddaughter.
Would Casi-Casi and Plata (our two cats) navigate in a strange land?
But most of all there
is that concern that we would no longer have an efficient (in fact superb)
public library that would enable us to take books and DVDs home (imagine that!).
For better or for
worse (for better I am almost sure) this strange land of cyan/gray skies, a
land where people seem to eschew the telephone and face to face meetings in
cafés is a place in which I feel too comfortable to ever leave. I may not
belong to it until I am finally resting in some small plot of land or in a
little urn in a niche.
And this was not more
evident than last night. Thanks to $3.00 RCA cables from my nearby Kerrisdale
Dollar Store and the retrieval of my VHS machine from our basement we were able
to watch Otto Preminger’s, 1957 Saint Joan with Jean Seberg, Richard Widmark,
John Gielgud and the very sweet Irish actor Richard Todd (A scheduling conflict prevented him from being James Bond in Dr. No). That Saint Joan, the film, is based
on the play by George Bernard Shaw and has a screenplay by Graham Greene is icing on
a very rich cake. What could be a better provider of instant satisfaction after
seeing Meg Roe in the Arts Club Theatre’s production of Saint Joan than this
film? We were able to compare notes and know at any moment what the lines would
be. And I must point out that Limelight Video's VHS copy of Saint Joan is the only game in town.
It is this instant
satisfaction (well with just a bit of old fashioned ingenuity as I had to connect the VHS machine to our only TV set, a now ancient Sony Trinitron) that makes us
want to stay put. And stay put we will until circumstances force a change. And for as long as things keep working efficiently in the city of cyan skies.
