Somehow thinking about our Nochebuena (Christmas dinner), a few (?) days ago, of which I will write about shortly, seems to have happened at an undefined time and day in an uncertain past.

In my profession of free-lance photography I never experienced that Monday to Friday thing, I felt strange when people would ask me, “How was your summer?” I worked when I could get work all year long.

It was my Rosemary who had her 9 to 5 job and that had us on a schedule and a pattern of either her driving to work or me doing it. As soon as she stopped working and my photography went by the way of deadened journalism we began to confuse the days of the week.

These days, almost every day feels like a weekend.

In my boyhood the hot Buenos Aires summer days in that period between Christmas and Los Tres Reyes (Epiphany, January 6) was an eternity of waiting. It was on the 6^th when we received the really neat toys which were deposited by our shoes outside the bedroom door.

Now in this waning year the days between Christmas Day (we do nothing on that day as we celebrate Christmas Eve) and New Year’s, are confusing. They are neither short nor long and the day of the week they are is a conundrum of doubt.

But it is on those days when one can do what old people like me do which is to reminisce of our past. Not exactly as I have written here my exciting plans for 2020.

I brought back my blog from long time ago about New Year’s in Houston, Texas (a drunk New Year’s) and another when Rosemary were either married or not quite married. The photo, probably taken by a chap selling coconuts with rum, was in Mocambo, a beach in Veracruz. Rosemary was wearing a dress that she has forgotten she ever wore.

I cannot. It was in this very short dress that I had spotted her a few months before (from the rear outside an English school). I saw the dress, the beautiful legs and the long, blonde, straight hair (she used an iron).

What is amazing is that the photograph that appears in that blog, was a scan of a small photograph from our now discontinued family album. The picture you see here is from the original colour negative. There is something to be said about being able to find negatives that I took so long ago.

In that sheet of colour negatives there are many that are most interesting featuring my mother, Rosemary and our baby Alexandra Elizabeth and her godmother.

Godparents are very important in Latin American countries. They indeed are called to help if parents die or when financial assistance is needed. The relationship between a parent and a godfather makes the godfather “mi compadre” or my friend I share my fatherhood with. The term for godmother is “mi comadre”. Sometimes in a politically incorrect century I Mexico, comadres were women who liked to gossip.

The two extra pictures here were taken around 1968. They are in the crater of the Nevado de Toluca:

Nevado de Toluca ( ‎4,680 m,15,350 ft) is a stratovolcano in central Mexico, located about 80 kilometres (50 mi) west of Mexico City near the city of Toluca. It is the fourth highest of Mexico's peaks, after Pico de Orizaba, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. The volcano and the area around it is now a national park.

Etymology: It is often called by the Nahuatl name Xinantecatl which is usually translated as The Naked Lord, Señor Desnudo in Spanish, although other etymologies have been suggested such as "Lord of the Corn Stalks", Tzinacantecatl or Zinacantepec (Mountain of the Bats). Further evidence regarding the etymologies of this mountain has surfaced after many archeology discoveries in and around the area. It has been concluded that its correct etymology is Chicnauhtecatl meaning "nine lakes" as the top of the cone has various deep lakes.

Wikipedia

There is a dirt road that winds up into the crater. One of the lakes is called The Lake of the Moon. We went in our blue VW with our compadre Andrew Taylor. Some hardy souls treck up the inside sides of the volcano and ski town. There is no chair lift to go up again!

I am wearing a ceramic fired peace symbol I had purchased at the end of 1967 as well as the US Marine Corps jacket that was surplus probably because it had a repaired patch,at the height of the crotch, where the previous owner might have been shot in Vietnam. The scarf I lost many years later when running during a windstorm in Victoria during a photo assignment. I cried when I lost it as it had been given to me by my Argentine girlfriend Susy during a miserable Buenos Aires winter.