The last time I owned and rode a bike was in 1955. I wrote about it here. Not mentioned is how that black Raleigh replaced my horse. This is funny as while in Mexico City I was very good at playing bicycle polo on the fashionable street where we lived in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. The street was Sierra Madre.

Our neighbours across from us were the high society Rincón Gallardos. They had two sons. Their father and grandfather had been generals since the Mexican Revolution. I played polo with the boys. They were pretty good as they also dabbled in the sport on their very own horses. Every birthday some misguided soul gave me a croquet set. I would not have been caught dead with it. But the mallets did just fine for our brand of polo and the wooden balls were close to the real thing.

In 1955 my mother moved to Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico. It was a mining town run by the American Smelting & Refining Company. We lived in the American Hotel in the hill overlooking the town. Since we were part of the privileged (in spite of the fact my mother was only the school teacher at the Company American School, two rooms they were, we were all given a horse to ride. We usually went cross country (it was a very dry desert with lots of thorny bushes) to visit Stephen Frazier whose mother had a large ranch. My horse was a young guy who was as stubborn as a mule. Leaving the stables he would refuse to gallop and only trotted. I was told he disliked to be separated from his mother. Going with my friends to the ranch was a chore. Returning home I was always first as my horse/mule galloped to see mother.

I finally gave up on the horse and accompanied my school mates in my black Raleigh. I had purchased in Eagle Pass, Texas a special viscous liquid that I squeezed into the inner tubes. This rendered my tires almost puncture proof.

Once I started high school at St. Ed’s in Austin (the school in Nueva Rosita went up to grade 8 and I had suffered a year with my mother as the teacher), my bike disappeared from my radar and I never had one since then.

This will be remedied in a couple of weeks. I have ordered a bicycle from West Point Cycles. The folks there have measured me so that I will surely fit. At first I will be inflexible because of my arthritis. Should I purchase stirrups to get on?

From my Yorkshire friend and compadre (he is the godfather of my oldest daughter) Andrew Taylor I received this communication:

Buy the bikes. Among the Cognoscenti,  "Fixies" are all the rage, but I think that having a few gears would be nice. Look into a bike with themodern rendition of the old Sturmey-Archer 3 speed, with the planetary gear in the rear hub; they are bullet proof, do not need adjusting and look cleaner than the usual derailleurs.

 A.

Andrew’s advice is good as he is an expert biker who is one of the oldest and best long distant cyclists in Mexico.

Why am I now buying a bicycle at age 73? Rosemary and I are moving in a bit to a street in Vancouver that is two blocks from a very nice shopping district with restaurants, tea rooms, sports bars, a very large and new Safeway, Lens & Shutter, bookstores, a Macdonald’s, a Dairy Queen  and I must mention the Transylvanian Baker that I will bike to!

The bike will have that hub that Andrew has suggested, a wicker basket for the front, two blinking lights, one for the front and one for the back, a rear view mirror and I have purchased the cheapest helmet as it is just plain functional and will not make me look like a praying mantis. I will order some sort of rack so I can pick up my granddaughter Lauren, 13, and we can bike to the nearby Kid’s Bookstore or the nice Macdonald Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

I cannot wait for my shiny new blue bike.

I never met Ken Millard. I saw his obituary in my October 9 2015 Vancouver Sun. But I knew who he was and I had listened to a concert at the Orpheum many years ago with my two young daughters in which his violin bows made a prominent aural appearance. I wrote about it here.

The obituary mentions that Millard became allergic to the wood of the violin bows he made. My connection to all this is that I know the man whose violin bow made Millard allergic. It is my friend, the virtuoso violinist Marc Destrubé.

 Ken Millard, the co-founder of the Galiano Conservancy Association and a key figure in the land trust movement in BC and Canada, died suddenly at home on September 27, 2015 on Galiano Island, at the age of 74. Ken leaves behind a legacy of more than 500 acres of Galiano land protected forever, and a strong organization dedicated to conservation and education. Kenneth Young Millard, born on July 10, 1941 in Tacoma Park, Maryland, is survived by his wife Linda Millard, and their two daughters, Beth (Reg) Thiessen and Lisa Millard, and Lisa's five children; as well as Ken's older brother John Millard, of Virgina, and younger sister Doris Spencer, of Colorado. After achieving his PhD in physics from Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, Ken taught in Missouri and at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. Then he followed his love of early baroque music to a successful second career as a luthier, studying in Salt Lake City, Utah and apprenticing with luthier Anton Smith. He became one of the world's finest makers of baroque violin bows, selling them to renowned musicians worldwide. Sadly, Ken developed a sensitivity to certain kinds of wood and ceased his work as a luthier. Ken first came to Galiano Island in the late 1970s, to perform in an early music ensemble in which he played the viola da gamba. The Millards loved Galiano and soon bought a 24-acre waterfront property on which the family camped until they built a cottage with co-owner Dan Bloomberg. Ken and Linda became fulltime residents by the late 1980s. Ken co-founded the Galiano Conservancy Association in 1989, with a group of like-minded islanders who were concerned about clearcut logging and sought to preserve Galiano's sensitive forest ecosystems, watersheds and coastline. Ken volunteered the last 26 years of his life at the Conservancy, achieving protection of hundreds of acres, including the 188-acre Learning Centre site. Since 2000, the Conservancy has provided nature education programs to 30,000 people of all ages. Ken fostered partnerships with government, business and land trusts. He mentored hundreds of volunteers and leaves behind a strong community committed to conservation, along with a dedicated staff that has vowed to continue his work while deeply mourning his passing. His grieving community of colleagues, friends and family will gather at a memorial service for Ken on Sunday, October 11 at 1 pm, at the Conservancy's Learning Centre land, at 10825 Porlier Pass Road, on Galiano. In lieu of flowers, Ken's family requests that donations be made in his name to the Galiano Conservancy Association.

Published in Victoria Times Colonist from Oct. 8 to Oct. 9, 2015

Of late I have been looking around my house for stuff that I can say I have done for the last time and that soon whatever it was will be in our new house.

I never thought that the Ikea-type mirror that has been in our guest  room  since we moved here in 1986 was especially beautiful. But it has served it its purpose in providing me with the opportunity to photograph my subjects before or after a formal session. Especially fun has been to include myself in the picture.

What has made the shooting of this convenient, effortless I would say, is the use of my Fuji X-E1 digital camera which I purchased three years ago on the urging of my more intelligent Rosemary.

This batch of double selfies (as I call them) are of the Seattle baroque cellist Juliana Soltis.

I remember with some distaste browsing a Hallmark Card shelf at a local stationery store. This may have happened about ten years ago. The bulk of the cards were supposed to be funny.  For me a Hallmark Card was always a reduced exercise in the Cyrano de Bergerac syndrome of having someone else say what we could not personally put down on paper.  A nice birthday letter for me always trumped a Hallmark Card.

Thankfully in this 21^st century when Hallmark Cards, like newspapers are moribund, and Christmas cards are almost forgotten we need not trouble ourselves in going to that stationery store. We now have the improvement of being able to text our greetings and even end relationships via that smart phone.

Socially we are becoming inept as we increasingly rely on “Social Media” to wish or friends happy birthdays. We no longer need to apologize  for forgetting. Facebook gives us reminders.

But the worst aspect of this decaying social media is the event invitation. They are now coming fast and plentiful. The appearance of intimacy is only superficial. This is plain mass-mailing-without-stamps. Some of the mass mailings of the past at least contained a personal signature in longhand.

I would like to find a Facebook tool or app that would enable me to stop receiving event invites.

I could write on how we enjoyed it or that the directing was able and tight. I could use that staple expression of theatre critics (I am not one of them, I am an amateur blogger) that Disgraced was “thought provoking.”

But I am not.

To anybody who has gotten this far I will forewarn them that this will be long-winded and opinionated. The play is central to two facts and one painting. Of the former it is about India before partition in 1947 and about racism. The latter about Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar’s magnificent portrait of  his assistant/slave Juan de Pareja.

But let me digress first.

Since I was a little boy in Buenos Aires I was surrounded by an awareness of social classes, religious intolerance and out and out racism.

Very much like in the United States and even Canada, Spanish colonizers of Argentina and then the leaders of the young nation in the 19^th century pushed the native “indios” West and South with armies. The few that remained became in the 20^th century “cabecitas negras” or little black heads. The upper social classes, traditionally the Catholic Church, the armed forces and the wealthy landowners looked down on the working class.

My Spanish-born grandmother told me that the Jews had killed Christ. I had a terrible time reconciling that with the fact that my best friend, Mario Hertzberg, who lived across the street, was Jewish.

In one of my trips to Buenos Aires in the late 80s, one of my nephews asked me if blacks (negros in Argentine Spanish) smelled differently. Much later he asked me how I could tell the difference between the Chinese and the Japanese. I told him (perhaps in jest, perhaps in my own confusion) that it was very easy and you knew right away. When there was doubt the person was Korean. And since my mother was from the Philippines I added that Filipinos and Malaysians were Malays and not Chinese at all.

In my years in Texas in the mid to late 50s Latinos were not yet Latinos. Texans who were not of that extraction simply called them spicks or Mexcans (without that i). So people of that extraction would anglicize the pronunciation of their names (much as they still do today with Latino baseball players). Reyes was Reys. And none of the people of this extraction (particularly my fellow students in my boarding school in Austin) would have ever been caught talking Spanish or admitting they could speak it.

In Mexico, where I lived for many years we often read that the biggest difference between pure blooded Native Mexicans and Spaniards was the abundance of facial hair in the latter. Thus until most recently dark-skinned Mexican policemen wore large moustaches and women sported unshaved legs beneath very nice sheer stockings.

When my Canadian wife and two Mexican born daughters arrived in Vancouver in 1975 I was astounded to notice that Native Canadians did not have red skin and that they looked very much like the Native Mexicans but could not speak Spanish.

It was later in the 70s when going to Saturday evening parties seemed to be in vogue that my Rosemary and I would get into our Rabbit and I would turn on the radio to a CBC Radio program that fascinated me. It was called Our Native Land. The music was splendid country and western but when that music “devolved” to chanting my wife seemed uncomfortable. Being a rude Latin American (not yet a Canadian) I would tell her, “This is the music of the people of your country. What is your problem? " This invariably made her angry and she would turn off the radio. To the detriment of the CBC I have always wondered why they canned this informative and entertaining program.

Also in the late 70s while printing in my Burnaby darkroom, one of my fave radio programs was the CBC’s Doctor Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show which starred two of the funniest men on earth, Bill Reiter and Norm Grohmann. One routine that was outrageously funny (it could not possibly run in 2015) was that of the Lone Deranger and his Faithful Friend Toronto. Toronto was played to perfection by Norn Grohmann with an extreme Punjabi accent. At the time there was a large influx of immigrants from what we used to call the Indian Subcontinent.

Stand-up comedians and jokes on the street made fun of the “Pakis.” The jokes were no different and no less cruel that the Jew jokes of the past centering on a perceived Jewish penchant for frugality. These immigrants became Canadians and one of them almost became Prime Minister but did manage to be a Premier of BC and a Minister of Parliament.

In the late 70s and 80s I took photographs for CBC Television and Radio. I noted that the only Native Canadian within the corporation was an actor in The Beachcombers. I never saw any as stagehands, cameramen or anywhere else.

An early job renting cars for Tilden Rent-A-Car came with instructions not to rent to anybody with the surname of George or John. When I asked I was answered, “Don’t rent to Indians.”

By now you must be getting my drift about my exposure to racism and my possible difficulty to be free of sin or able to cast that first stone.

When the folks from Hong-Kong started arriving in the 80’s the East Indians were forgotten. This influx was different from others. In San Francisco they called them Yacht people. That first wave was practical. They purchased Volvos. Don Docksteader made a mint.

In the 90s and in the beginning of the 21^st century I noticed that the Hong Kong Chinese did not talk to the Taiwan Chinese and that the Mainland Chinese avoided the Hong Kong Chinese and the Taiwanese. I was clued in by an older Taiwanese neighbour that the Mainland Chinese considered them unclean in that they had learned Japanese during the WWII occupation of Formosa.

This much newer batch of wealthy immigrants, simply because they come to a new world where they can begin anew, puts them in a situation where they are unlikely to want to communicate with their neighbours to which they refer as Caucasians. To me that use is almost no different from that unsavoury “Paki.” In my neighbourhood that is mostly populated by these immigrants I feel alienated. If it has taken me all these years to finally feel part of this city and this country I now have doubts about fitting in. As a joke (a terrible and perhaps even in bad taste) I tell my Argentine relatives that I want to go for an extended visit to Patagonia so that I will again feel at home, a home free of  BMWs and Mercedez Benzes.

But there is hope. Hope must be assimilation. We all know that sooner or later a second generation will adopt some of the ways of the locals like Tim Horton’s doughnuts and the clothing at Mark's Work Wearhouse.  But until that happens I believe that we in Vancouver are sitting on a smoldering and festering dose of out an out racism that goes (is this a new feature?) both ways.

I remember taking photographs, many times of Lieutenant Governor David Lam (1988-1995). We became friends. To me he did a splendid job of doing everything possible to bring the Caucasians and the Chinese together. I have not seen much of an attempt to keep working at that since. Articles on the expensive real estate in Vancouver in our daily newspapers seem to fan these flames which I believe will finally erupt.

All the above came to my head as I watched Disgraced. To those who are under 30 they might not understand the protagonist’s problem. His parents had been born in the Indian Subcontinent before 1947. They were Indian. After partition (and many have forgotten) there was India which was separated from the more Muslim population of West and East Pakistan. Can you imagine creating a country that is divided by another? Have we forgotten that East Pakistan became a hapless Bangladesh that seems to be at the mercy of monsoons, storms, flooding and famine?

So our protagonist, who wants to be upwardly mobile and mostly succeeds at it by calling himself an Indian even though he was born in a contemporary Pakistan. India, East Indian, even Hindu (or that Kipling Hindoo) has a better ring than Paki. And so Amir, played to perfection by Patrick Sabongui, like a red-egged Humpty Dumpty has a great fall.

A similar watering down of one's perceived heritage, used to avoid typecasting, is the Iranian immigrants in our city who call themselves Persians. To my knowledge there is no such country as Persia. 

The rest of the cast, Amir’s blonde wife, Emily (Kyra Zagorsky dressed to perfection by Costume Designer Barbara Clayden), the idealistic nephew Abe (Conor Wylie), Amir’s acquaintance but Emily’s artistic consultant and art show organizer Isaac (Robert Maloney) and his really upwardly mobile and black wife Jory (Marci T. House) is excellent.

I would like to congratulate Mr. Millerd, who is ahead of the pack in choosing Disgraced. My NY Times has informed me that his play will be the most produced play in the US this year.

Disgraced is a comedy that ends in tragedy like a good opera. But this is an opera with a biting reality that we who live in Vancouver should take heed of and try and work at it so that we, too, might not, be disgraced.

Velásquez’s painting of his household slave, and helper Juan de Pareja whom he freed is the inspiration for Emily who paints her Amir as such a man. It is perhaps appropriate that while Juan de Pareja’s features are negroid it is not known in fact if he was that or if he was a Muslim (was he a mulatto or a morisco?) Why appropriate? Some in the audience might have opined that Patrick Sabongui’s features weren’t …..enough. I am pleased his skin was not darkened. 

Doctor Bundolo was funny? Were many people offended? Is there an equivalent TV or radio show lampooning (Oh so gently! Please!) what is happening in Vancouver now? Would it make the situation worse? 

I believe that we must learn to laugh together. I believe we must persuade Bill Reiter and Norm Grohman to unretire. I believe that Disgraced is a warning.