Saturday, September 03, 2022

 

Girolamo Clemente

 

My car mechanic friend posted this on August 29 at 8:45 PM

Talk about A lucky break

And malfunction in my pacemaker and I dropped like a pair and died ! Yes I dead kind!!!

We were on our way to Chilliwack Hospital for an appointment and arrived 10 minutes early cross the parking lot up onto this sidewalk and drop dead!

A ladies song Karen crying and trying to revive me and went running into the emergency ward and cold for help

From their luckily everything happened extremely quick Karen was basically picked up and pulled away and they started to try CPR a nurse who was the trainer for CPR push that girl aside and started to do CPR at herself pushing so hard today 10 days later my chest still hurts

That didn’t work and they arrived with defibrillators and zapped me back to breathing

I was in the right place at the right time to still be here and lucky enough to have people who are trained on hand almost immediately

Nobody knows why it happened it just happened my heart just stopped which I think is a similar thing that happened to mutual friend Diane

One thing I can tell you is that there’s no white light on the other side and the worst part just before I revived or became conscious following day following day was a nightmare that I won’t tell you you couldn’t understand it

So happy to be here but they did pull my license for six months but I’m going to buy a lottery ticket I feel lucky in by myself cool car and driver.

 Then there was this:

Girolamo Antonio Clemente

May 13, 1956 - August 30, 2022

We are heartbroken to announce the passing of Girolamo, after a long hard fight with heart disease on Tuesday August 30, 2022.

 

When I read this last night, 3 September 22, I felt extremely depressed as all my friends around me are dying. My isolation keeps growing. I knew I would have to write this.

After having a couple of boring (but most reliable VW Beetles in Mexico when Rosemary, our two daughters and I moved to Vancouver) I was going to change that by owning and exciting car. My two subsequent Fiat X-19s were exciting but not reliable.

I had those two Fiats repaired by Girolamo Clemente on Clemente European Motors on Kingsway. He was a charmer, but perhaps not as much as his serious (outside) father who was often there. 

 

Gio & father

Gio, as we all called him, said he was a forensic mechanic who could figure out what was wrong by the noises a car made.

One day he phoned me and told me that he had an exciting car for me at a good price. It was a 1982 Maserati Biturbo. When it ran is was a thrill. But more often the German transmission clunked, the windows did not go up or down and water went into the gasoline, oil into the water and other fluids who knows where.

Henceforth, my Rosemary rightfully dictated we would have reliable German cars. We had three Audis until she succumbed to my idea of a domestic Chevrolet Malibu and my present most reliable Chevrolet Cruze.

But it was Gio who introduced me to what I would call a rite of passage for a man who wants to have an exciting car that makes loud exhaust noises and looks good. That rite of passage slipped into my realization that slipping clutches were not my idea of exciting.

So Gio I offer my thanks for the trip with those Italian cars and I hope you do well wherever you might be now.

 

 

Friday, September 02, 2022

 

Rosa 'Margaret Merril' 2 September 2022

 

“Caminábamos con Borges por un barrio de quintas, en Mar del Plata, y de pronto sentí un olor que me conmovió. Borges me dijo que los recuerdos que más nos emocionan son los de olores y gustos, porque suelen estar rodeados de abismos de olvido: hay que oler el mismo olor para recordar un olor, hay que sentir el mismo gusto para recordar un gusto (no ocurre así con imágenes y sonidos). ¡Con qué emoción volvemos a oler el mismo olor que por última vez olimos en tiempos lejanos, en lugares a los que nunca volveremos!”

We were walking with Borges in a neighbourhood with country farms in Mar del Plata and suddenly I was felt a smell that moved me. Borges told me that that the memories that we most felt are the smells and tastes, as they usually surrounded by gulfs of forgetfulness: you must smell the same smell to remember a smell, and one must feel the same taste to remember a taste (that does not happen with images and sounds).  With what emotion we return to smell the same smell which we experienced for the last time in our past in places we will never return!” 

Adolfo Bioy Casares recounting a walk with Jorge Luís Borges.

 

I understand the above well as I remember the last time that Rosemary sniffed our Rosa ‘Margaret Merril’ in our old garden. It did not survive and I was not able to find one to buy until after Rosemary had died on December 9 2020.

She would not have known and I do know, thanks to Goggle as to who Margaret Merril was.

 

Margaret Manton Merrill

Margaret Manton Merrill (1859 – June 19/20, 1893) was a British-born American journalist, writer, translator, and elocutionist. At the age of twenty, she became the founder, owner and editor of the Colorado Temperance Gazette. She stayed in journalism for twelve years, where her noted successes were in the line of stories for children, while she likewise made translations from such diverse languages as Scandinavian and Sioux.

Wikipedia

And the rose:

Rosa 'Margaret Merril' (aka HARkuly) is a white-blend Floribunda rose cultivar developed by Harkness Roses in 1972 and introduced into Great Britain in 1978. It is the winner of multiple rose awards, including the Geneva Gold Medal and Rome Gold Medal and the Hague and Auckland Fragrance awards. 

Wikipedia 

Not explained anywhere is why the rose's name has one less l in in Merril.

 

Rosa 'St. Swithun' 2 September 2022

 I Smell Sweet Savours

Today 2 September 2022 I noticed a rose, Rosa ‘St. Swithun’ that was in bloom but a bit past its prime. I stopped to smell it and I was rewarded by one of the most complex and wonderful scents in botany (my opinion). It is a scent that the English call myrhh.

Can a scent remind you of a person? With me, yes. I have written many times before (link above) that I remember the smell of my father that combined his Navy Cut Player cigarettes he smoked, the gin in his breath, lavender after shave and all those scents converging on his Harris Tweed jackets.   

But this morning when I took a whiff of St. Swithun I immediately was reminded of my Rosemary.

I remember one afternoon when she came back from a VanDusen Garden show and told me, “Alex, there is rose in the Phoenix Perennials booth that has a smell that is heavenly. I am going back tomorrow as this display rose has my name on it.” And so it was and Rosemary introduced me to the myrrh scented English Roses.

Rosemary rarely wore perfume so it is the scent of St. Swithun that to me is Rosemary.

Luckily my ability to smell is extremely good.                            

Thursday, September 01, 2022

 

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 31 August 2022

Pristine

From Middle French pristin, borrowed from Latin prīstinus.

1. Unspoiled; still with its original purity; uncorrupted or unsullied.

2. Primitive, pertaining to the earliest state of something.

3. Perfect.

Wikipedia

 

I remember that first time I spotted my Rosemary in late 1967 from the back. She was walking away from a school in Mexico City where we both (so I found out) taught English. I saw a woman with long and straight blond hair, wearing a mini-skirt. Her legs were perfect.

Soon after, on February 8^th, we were married.

I could write, and I am, that my initial memory of Rosemary was and is a pristine one. But thanks to the roses of our garden I have come to appreciate the stages in a person’s life, the stages in the life of my Rosemary. 

Rosemary & Alexandra 1969

 

In our Kits garden 2020

I was interested, all these years, in the Rosemary before I found her. Now in my Kits bedroom I have discovered some of her diaries written in Mexico before she met me. There is a lovely book, México – Pintura de Hoy – Fondo de Cultura Económica – 1964 with her beautiful printed name on it that should have given me a hint on her interest in art. She paid 150 pesos for it.

As we both grew old together, I adored how she aged and the fact that I was never interested in buying a red Miata sports car and looking for a younger woman.

Now with her not around I am not in the least interested in any women. In spite of my grief at my loss I find that as a relief. 

The rose illustrating this blog was one of Rosemary's favourite red roses. It is a scan at an early stage of a rose's path to open perfection. At one time I would have felt in snipping it before it reached that perfection. It is lovely and  can I write that it is pristine and perfect? 

 

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

3pm, 31 August 2022

According to my Mappin & Webb birth spoon, given to me by my Aunt Inez Barber, I was born ten to three in the morning of the 31st of August of 1942.

My birth was recorded by a photographer with a magnesium flash. I knew then and there that someday I would be a photographer.

My mother told me that my father forgot to register my birth with the authorities. By the time he went it was April 18, 1943. That is the date on all my documents including my birth certificate.

With Auntie Inez in Buenos Aires - 1942

 I was born in the Sanatorio Anchorena which is now housed in a modern building in downtown Buenos Aires.

Eighty years later to that 1942 date, I have followed a personal custom of taking a self-portrait. This one is old-fashioned-elaborate because I used a film camera, a Mamiya RB-67 Pro SD loaded with the now discontinued  Fuji Instant B&W film FP 3000B. I fired the camera with a rubber bulb.

What you see here is not the print but the scanned negative that I reversed in Photoshop.

Tonight I am having a birthday dinner, to not only celebrate mine, but also my eldest daughter Alexandra’s  who was 54 on the 27^th. Present will be my other daughter Hilary and her two daughters Lauren and Rebecca. We will be enjoying a meal at the Italian restaurant in the Italian Cultural Centre.

I am a tad disappointed that I will not be able to bring Niña and Niño to enjoy the repast.

The best birthday gift that I have received today was a rendezvous lunch (that is the word he used) with Malcolm Parry at the Princeton Pub. He is really the reason why it was that I had a magazine photographic career.

I am not as thin as he is but he was wearing shorts and will be 86 in October.  His memory is remarkable so we had a lovely time.

There were a couple of men in a nearby table who informed Mac that he was heading in the wrong direction as he was walking to the women’s facilities. While he was gone, I asked the two gentlemen if by any chance they were dock workers. They told me that they had been but were now retired. I then asked them if they knew Randy Rampage. Both looked at me with delight and answered in the affirmative.

All in all this birthday without my Rosemary promises to be one that is not all that bad.

And as per usual when I am going somewhere where Hilary will be I always dress in my favourite T-shirt of her crying when she was a baby. That is the T in today's self-portrait.