Sometime in the late 90s while on a trip to Buenos Aires I was invited for an asado at my nephew Georgito O’Reily’s house in San Isidro. It was dusk and soon I noticed hundreds of bichos de luz or fireflies. I knew I had to look up. I did and square in the middle of the sky I saw the Southern Cross. I was hit by nostalgia for the sky of my youth.

The Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok used to say: “The Southern Hemisphere holds all the good stuff.” He was probably referring to the fact that we have “the two best globular clusters, the largest and brightest naked-eye external galaxies, the largest diffuse nebula, the largest dark nebula and a Milky Way bright enough under our dark transparent skies to cast shadows during certain times of the year,” in the words of the journalist Luke Dodd.

From The Dazzle of the Southern Sky by Vanessa Barbara – NY Times

It was during this drive to Santa Teresita  that I can attest to journalist Luke Dodd’s asserting that the dark transparent skies cast shadows. I could see my hands from the huge swath of the Milky Way that swept from one end of the horizon to the other. The many stars had earthly competition from a myriad of bichos de luz (luciérnagas or fireflies) that were everywhere. There was a din of crickets and other insects. And the great Southern Sky was there beckoning us to our destination. I was much too young to associate the experience with Gaspar, Balthazar and Melchior leading their camels in a similar but certainly inferior sky as they were in the Northern Hemisphere.

Olaf Stapeldon's The Starmaker

A few days ago I fired up my VHS machine and inserted one of the few known available copies of Robert Rossen’s terrific 1949 All the King’s Men. The film features a Canadian-born actor ( I mistakenly thought he was from the prairies) John Ireland.

Watching his face, and because this is Christmas and Christmas is a time for reflection I remembered exactly the time I first saw John Ireland in a film.

In 1949 my father and I took the train from Coghlan to Retiro, the cavernous downtown terminal. From there we stepped down escalators to the subte that took us to Lavalle Station. There we walked to one of the many  movie theatres that lined that street  for blocks. We were there to see (now I know the details) Bob Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James. John Ireland plays Bob Ford the man who does in James. There was something about Ireland’s face, perhaps a look of despair and or doubt that may have affected my young mind. Or it could have been that this film, even though it was a Western, had no clear villain in a black hat and a hero in a white one.  I had yet to discover Hopalong Cassidy who always wore a black hat.

Since that film I have always admired Ireland as the flawed, hero with inner conflicts that are patently all over his face.

Al the King’s Men followed that impression I had of the man. It takes his character, Jack Burden, a long time in the film to realize the corruption within Willie Stark (played by an awesome Broderick Crawford). But in the last few seconds of the film Ireland comes through.

Thanks to Wikipedia I was pleasantly surprised that Ireland, born, January 30, 1914, in Vancouver, was the first Vancouverite to be nominated for an Oscar in his supporting role in All the King’s Men.

The shenanigans that I see on CNN with Rachel Maddow make all the goings on of All the King’s Men seem tame.

And I always find it pleasant but curious how my memory links to events long past.

On October 27, 1996 my wife and two daughters and I went to Ryerson United to a concert given by the Pacific Baroque Orchestra and the Electra Women’s Choir. They performed Vivaldi’s Gloria in D major RV 589.

Since then I have witnessed many Bach Passions, Handel operas, Monteverdi Operas and all of the Bach Cantata Projects through the years brought to us by Early Music Vancouver.

Doctor Stephen Drance at left

One would have to live in sunny Guadalajara, Mexico, Buenos Aires or even Langley (if one were unwilling to drive to Vancouver for these concerts) to eventually stop taking for granted that we are blessed in Vancouver to have such an active early music scene, new music scene (particularly that of the Turning Point Ensemble), opera and the symphonic contributions of the Vancouver Symphony.  Yes we are blessed.

Sometimes, even though I do not live in sunny Guadalajara, I find myself taking for granted these big extravaganzas at the Chan Centre. But Sunday the 21^st Early Music Vancouver production (with contributions from the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Portland Baroque Orchestra  and Pacific Musicworks, all combined as A Northwest  Baroque Masterworks Project)  made me realize that I have to pinch myself and realize my luck. I was reminded when EMV Artistic Director spoke out of the past contributions of Former Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra , Marc Destrubé, to the ongoing Bach Christmas Cantata Project. I would have added the name of lute player and instrument maker Ray Nurse.

I remember the early versions of the Cantata Project held at the UBC Chapel by the UBC Golf Club. The acoustics were so deadening that Nurse’s group, La Cetra installed a temporary plywood floor at the altar space where they played.

What I am attempting to write is that in Vancouver we get the big productions but also the small and intimate ones.  Early Music Vancouver’s Dowland In Dublin. was set in something that resembled a cabaret. It was excellent. I like this balance. It is also nice to see members of the Bach Christmas Oratorio play in small groups like Arthur Neele's Stile Moderno or those fine and even more intimate little concerts featuring violinist Paul Luchkow and multi-keyboardist Michael Jarvis.

We are lucky that we now have the north-to-south musical axis that is Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle and Portland. But at the same time we might be made aware that is far cheaper for Americans to play in our neck of the woods than vice versa. Those Americans, in a rotten spirit of the value of cultural exchange make visas to play in the US expensive.

The Bach Christmas Oratorio (Cantatas 1,3,6) after performances, in Portland, Mercer Island, Seattle and Victoria came all together for us in Vancouver.  To tour a big ensemble in few days is a grueling piece of work.  As one of the solo singers told me, “We are going to do some drinking after tonight’s last performance.

I was lucky to be sitting very close to Doctor Stephen Drance and his wife. This man has been a tireless contributor in cash and organizational skills to make Early Music Vancouver be the institution that it is today.

Seats sold so quickly that Rosemary and my friend designer Graham Walker were not able to sit front row centre. When we sit there our noses are at the same height as the Chan stage.  For a while I have been writing about Walker’s shoe fetish. From our front row centre we get a special view of shoes. Alas we were on the side. But…

I will now diverge from saying how wonderful it was to see Director Stephen Stubbs direct and play the harpsichord standing up (Alexander Weimann,Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra also has this rare talent). Stubbs could have upped the ante by also playing his very large and long lute.

I will diverge from all that to state that from my vantage point as I watched the stage I could see some lips of extreme redness sock it to my eyes. The perfectly red lips were property of West Virginian-born, recently to Seattle via Oberlin, baroque cellist Juliana Soltis. During the interval I watched her on the wings. She was wearing a remarkable black taffeta dress and sported an extremely short haircut.

I have no memory of my first Christmas. But from the few I remember in the late 40s it seems that no Christmas means anything without reflecting on Christmases past. And no Christmas without children, or even teenagers can be a fill fledged one.

Rosemary and I are lucky to have our immediate family here and in Lillooet (our eldest daughter). This Christmas was the first one where Rosemary and I did not exchange anything.  I am not too happy about this so next year I will surprise her with something even if small and inexpensive.

Bad luck in cooking happened but it did not spoil our dinner.  I always char the roast beef in the barbecue before I finished it in the oven. I pre-heated the barbecue and when I was about to place the roast (this year smothered in Kitchen Bouquet) I noticed that the unit was out. I placed the roast in the oven with the potatoes, carrots and onions and Rosemary baked her superlative Yorkshire Pudding. We had a tossed salad but refrained from dessert this year. It was pleasing, for once not to be completely stuffed.

Bruce, Ale and I had a bottle of red Spanish wine given to me by former Vancouver Poet Laureate George McWhirter.

The time for opening the presents happened but our older granddaughter was not too gracious in accepting them. We first took our important group photograph. Rebecca remindde me of it. Rosemary's cat Casi-Casi refused his red bow or posing. He seemed to lack the proper Christmas spirit. My Plata struggled but she is in the picture.

All in all it was a good Christmas and I hope that next year’s will be a better one. One thing that will not happen will be the barbecue fiasco. I am buying a second tank.

I have been meaning to write something associated with lifespans for a while. Last night in a bout of my perennial insomnia I thought about adding to my little essay on the tenacity of my cat to live, the idea that a cat’s lifespan is much compressed. Rebecca clinched it by saying today, “Plata was born the same year as I was so that makes us the same age in years, but not in cat years.”

In the early 70s when I taught high school in Mexico City to filthy rich and spoiled American teenagers I  had the problem of reticent kids not willing to say anything in class. One of the tricks I used that brought lots of class contribution was the idea that in some far away future we would all be born with a blank line on our left wrist that would slowly edge in red in one direction.  Since science in the future would be able to project an accurate lifespan for all of us, the little but inexorably moving line would tell us about our “battery life”. The question I asked my students was, “How would we live our life if we knew how much time we had left?”

I was born in 1942. My father left our house in 1950. I saw him again for about a year in 1965. This meant that his lifespan and mine mingled for just 9 years and I am not considering the first three or four years of my existence when I would not have known of his existence.

Of my mother she was with me (or I with her) until 1972. That means that we shared a lifespan for 30 years with those first three or four of my life a blank. If I add 30 to 9 that would mean that the 47 years  I have lived with my wife Rosemary exceed those 30. That is most amazing.

Last year Lauren and I checked up on Puig (pronounced puch) almost every day. He(she?) was a spider that moved into our house in the beginning of November on the inside window of our front door. He was there until late January. One day he (she?) was gone.

That shared lifespan between Lauren and her grandfather has been a bond between us in some ways as important as the one that I share with Rosemary.  We were both present when my mother breathed in and did not exhale again.

At this Christmas time and those lazy but important days until and including the Epiphany on January 6 there is plenty of time to think about all the above and to reflect on all those red lines (some finished, some at the beginning, some in the middle, and those for whose the lines are about to terminate) that we (and I) have shared knowingly and unknowingly. Sometimes (and it would seem at most important times) those lines do not run in parallel, or do they diverge on converge. Sometimes they cross. 

Those crossings can be like that of a motorist my mother and I never met. I was about 8 and we were crossing a busy street in Buenos Aires (near Juramento) called Cabildo. My grandmother was already on the other side. Suddenly she shouted,” Nena, go back.”  We did just at the moment that a speeding car would have run us over.  

A young man called Angel sat me at a chair in Arsenal Naval Buenos Aires, I was a raw sailor recruit who was unaware that my will to do anything would be nonexistent for two years without the express permission of even a lowly superior.  With a smile on his face Angel asked me how I wanted  my hair cut. I told him. He then proceeded to give me a “doble cero”. He shaved my head clean. Then he surprised me. He told me, “ Captain Hans Langsdorff, the captain of the battleship Admiral Graff Spee, shot himself with a Luger in this room, over by that corner.” That moment I crossed lines with a dead man and I have never forgotten and with a live man I never met again who called himself Angel.

Every once in a while (not too often) I get a few communications from people who begin by writing, “I don’t know how I stumbled upon your blog, but thank you.”  The red line is silently ticking with a few crosses here and there.  

When Rebecca was 10 the three of us flew to Buenos Aires. I crossed Cabildo at the exact same spot with the two. I never told them of the previous, almost tragic, event at those coordinates.  

Plata was five or six when I saw her at the SPCA 11 years ago. She looked like a snow leopard and pranced like a ballerina. I brought her home.  Our black male cat had died of a heart attack while watching Vertigo with her mistress Rosemary (my wife). We had a female cat, too, a white one called Polilla. I did not understand then the problem of having two female cats as theirs were irreconcilable differences.

Polilla was eviscerated by a raccoon soon after so Niño came to live with us but he developed cancer and suffered so much I brought him back from the vet’s in a cardboard box and I buried him in the garden. It would seem that Plata has co-inhabited with a few cats.

Plata is the most independent cat we have ever had.  She never liked to have her ears touched but did accompany us around the block in our summer walks, to the amazement of our Chinese neighbours. I would point at Plata and say, “She not cat. She dog that looks like cat.” I am not sure I was believed.

Now at 17-plus Plata still scampers on the kitchen table, up to the refrigerator and from there to cabinets by the ceiling. She still cleans herself very well but has a kidney problem. She drinks a lot of water. She is smart about that.

But Plata is now less independent. When I watch the afternoon news or a film she is next to me on the sofa.  In the morning she is on top of me on the bed and in the evening she lies next to me when I read in bed.  She is like glue. She nags to be fed and as long as she has an appetite I keep feeding her.

Rebecca, our 17-year-old granddaughter, says the cat should be put down. She says we are being cruel.

I have been thinking a lot about this. Plata does not seem to be in pain and she is alert. Unlike humans she cannot tell us to pull the plug. But then humans in a coma cannot tell us either.

For me Plata represents a living thing’s tenacity for life. At some point the negatives will outweigh the positives. I do not think we are there yet, the both of us.

I suspect that Casi-Casi, Rosemary's male cat would miss her. They seldom fight and coexist just fine.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

The ghost of Christmas past haunts me every year in the form of some sort of computer failure. I am writing this on an ancient Toshiba Tecra laptop. I have problems writing on a laptop keyboard.

In past holiday seasons the folks who host my blog and web page and also manage my domain name will pull the plug on all of it because of my credit card’s expiry date or some such thing.  No matter what you might think your presence in the internet can vanish in an instant. All those blog links in facebook will not be there.  And once you have resolved the credit card payment problem it takes three to five days for the blog to slowly come back up. In those terrible instances, at the very least I have dealt with friendly Roumanian tech  reps who speak  beautiful English.

My Windows-XP computer failed to boot up a couple of days ago.  My friend at Powersonic Computers on Bridgeport Road has identified the problem in my XP not in the hard drive. In a couple of days I should have it back. I will need to re-install my 9 year-old Photoshop but my friend and also my wife have urged me to switch to Windows 7.

I am unable to explain to them the concept of form follows function.  This idea from that past century was based on the simplicity of design. This 21^st century is now one that I call the Age of Fidget.

As an example I cite my iPhone 3G that has a rocker switch to adjust ringer volume.  On the upside the volume increases. On the downside it does the opposite. My Rosemary’s iPhone 4 has two switches. The simplicity of one switch is made “better” with two. I don’t think so.

My Outlook  Express is easy to the eye in its simplicity. My Rosemary’s Windows 7 email program is so loaded with stuff that I would not know how to start using it.

In design white space is very important. This idea would have upset those in another age of fidget, the Baroque  16^th and 17th century. Every nook and cranny of a Catholic Church altar had to have something.  Bach’s canons are a model for this elaborate complexity.  I will be the first to admit that while I love Bach canons I cannot abide by the complexity of contemporary (this 21^st century) digital cameras, the latest computer programs and all those improvements in smart phones.

I enjoy getting lost and then finding my way. I do not need “Dolores” to tell me in a sexy voice to turn left at the next block so I can arrive at the new pizza joint.

I cannot understand how folks will download an MP-3 audio file and then use elaborate devices to put back all the good stuff that was removed in compression. I just play CDs or records on my ancient but excellent sound system

I cannot understand why it is that if I correctly expose  a photograph with my Fuji-X-E1 why I must shoot RAW, just in case or as I have been told, “it is better”.

Photoshop allows me to correct the increased contrast of negatives and slides that are scanned. The highlight/shadow tool of my old Photoshop is plenty useful for that sort of thing. I do not need to get a bank loan to purchase the new improved Photoshop. In fact , for under $60 Corel’s Paintshop Pro will do the job. In the age of fidget the expensive complex is always “better”.

Until my old computer is fixed I will enjoy the simplicity and calm of this Christmas season.

Merry Christmas to all.