For 20 years my Rosemary and I have been having breakfast in bed with a generation of cats that have come and gone. We breakfast over the NY Times (hard copy) and the Vancouver Sun. The preparation of our morning meal is usually a joint one. We both go downstairs. But since today is Rosemary’s birthday I left her in bed and prepared it solo. One pleasant change is that instead of pouring Rosemary’s awful decaf and making my large mug of tea I ground the real coffee beans and we had a really good strong coffee.

Having a birthday during a pandemic lockdown has a few positive moments. This is that we both have the time to reflect. Rosemary is an internal person so perhaps she was not reflecting. But she did tell me in shock that in four years she is going to be 80 and I could feel the exclamation marks.

For me the reflection involved the idea that I have spent more than have a century with Rosemary. In Argentina yapa is what you get extra for free when you buy a product in some promotion. But I can also use it here. After 50 years together anything more is pure yapa.

I reflected on that half century of time and thought about many of the highlights of my life with the birthday girl.

For an unexplained reason, coincidence may be the only explanation, Rosemary inherited lots of traits from my mother and grandmother. For a few years Rosemary and my mother lived under the same roof and Rosemary did get to meet my grandmother before she died. Mother and wife got along wonderfully and a bond that Rosemary and I share is that we were present at my mother’s bedside when she breathed in and then died.

From my mother Rosemary inherited her lovely legs, a talent for teaching and a tendency to show love by action and good works and not by squeezing and kissing. It is from my grandmother that Rosemary had and has this uncanny talent for picking up sticks and moving to another country when things might not be good. My grandmother moved from Manila to the Bronx with her three children when she became a young widow. Just before the stock market crash she moved back to Manila and when she felt the winds of war in 1938 the family moved to Buenos Aires. In 1954 when Perón was in power we moved to Mexico City.

It was Rosemary who told me in 1975 that there were better opportunities for us in Vancouver even though she is from New Dublin, Ontario. It was Rosemary who made us move from our Burnaby townhouse to our corner Kerrisdale palace.

The selling of that palace and moving to Kitsilano is why we were able to inherit our two daughters while we are still alive and why we are weathering the pandemic with few problems.

I look forward to this quarantine to finally end and I long for those wonderful trips that Rosemary and I make to Buenos Aires, to Mérida and who knows what new place we will explore.

It will all be yapa.