Saturday, October 22, 2022

 

Rosa 'Westerland' 22 October 2022

Rosa 'Ebb Tide' 22 October 2022

Luke 22:19

King James Bible

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.

I never inject my religious beliefs into my blogs. But I often mention this citation from St. Luke which to me “Do this in remembrance of me,” is one of the finest bits of writing anywhere. It does not make a difference if you are a believer or not, to do some action, even an ordinary one, and to dedicate it to the memory of someone you love (or loved if dead) has no parallel.

My Rosemary died on December 9 2020 and there is not one day (day or night) that I do not remember her and the life we shared for 52 years.

 

I have a friend who is married but says he is happy to live in solitude. Unlike me he has been married before and had children with that first wife. He has lived in two cities in the US with these two women. I am unable to understand his contentment.

In my case I shared Mexico City, Burnaby, Vancouver and many trips to Mexico, the US, Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, France, England and Italy with her. We shared a large garden, two granddaughters and two daughters. We shared a love for dance, theatre, music and art. We loved to travel.

Having to live alone (ameliorated by the fact I have two generously affectionate cats, Niño and Niña, brother and sister), forces me into an unwanted but inescapable isolation. Luckily I can count my blessings of having lived a lifetime with Rosemary.

Today when I scanned a droopy Rosa ‘Westerland’(cut it yesterday but it did not like to wait until today to be scanned) and a dark red Rosa ‘Ebb Tide’, I did not have to think far to figure out that the two roses were all about Rosemary and that to scan them was an action of remembrance of her.

In Spanish “to share” is “compartir”. It is a beautiful word that has not been ruined by the social media kind of sharing. It literally means to part with (as in break with) and its origins may be from St. Luke and of Christ breaking bread to share with His apostles.

The orange rose was a rose that finally made Rosemary realize that a bright colour could be a nice one in a garden even if it was not blue or white (her favourite garden colours). We shared a love for this prolific and very healthy rose to which I always made Rosemary smile when I reminded her that it had the scent of synthetic apricot jam. And even in its droopy state it is lovely in what may be its last gasp until next year.

The second rose, a much more recent acquisition that Rosemary was able to see before she died, is a dark red colour that ages almost to black. She loved it elegance and its perfectly symmetrical petal layout.

While I scan, I try not to think as people are constantly telling me, “She would have liked that you are scanning these two roses.”

It is enough for me that the scanning of them, and many other plants, which now are near 3000, since I started in 2001; will probably disappear when I go to my own personal oblivion.

But while I am alive it is a personal remembrance. A remembrance that St. Luke the physician would say is good for the soul.

Monday, October 17, 2022

 

Rebecca Stewart & Brother Edwin Reggio,C.S. C. - Austin, Texas 2010

Afew days ago I sent the paragraph below to my eldest granddaughter Rebecca who is now 25.

Statistically you & I are in an extraordinary occurrence. I first met my Manila born Tía Fermina in Buenos Aires when I was 8. You met her in Houston when you were 11. I met Inecita,my godmother and first cousin when I was 8 at my birthday party (I don't remember her from my baptism!) & you met her when you were 7. I had Brother Edwin, C.S.C.  as a teacher in 1958 & I was 16. You were 10 when you stayed at St. Joseph's Hall. Also statistically nice, Abi [my wife Rosemary] not only met and we lived with my mother but also my grandmother. And of course she knew Inecita and Brother Edwin. Abi and I watched my mother die. You and I watched Abi die. You even met my half brother. You and I cannot escape this bond. It is a wonder.

Rebecca replied:

That is quite incredible. Never thought of it until now.

In my life there are multiple instances on the whims of why things happen. In an open letter, in my desk that I have never read written by my mother’s paramour when she was in Manila I know that in the contents he confesses that he is gay. My mother, sister, brother and widowed mother immediately moved to Buenos Aires. Which is why I was born there some years later.

In 1977 I participated in a coup (with 1906 Mauser in hand) against the then president of Argentina, Arturo Illía. He went home in a cab. In 1972 he gave a lecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City where I was teaching. After his lecture I told him about our connection. He gave me a big hug.

When I left Buenos Aires after my two year conscription in the Argentine Navy I was able to get on an ELMA (Empresa Líneas Marítimas Argentinas) Victory Ship called Río Aguapey that took me to my mother’s home in Veracruz. Only 10 years ago I found out it had been built in the Burrard Shipyards in North Vancouver.

At the end of 1967 after a short trip to San Francisco I had my hear, hippie style to my shoulders. I was laying around in a Veracruz beacn not knowing what to do with my life. I moved to Mexico City and my friend Raúl Guerrero Montemayor instructed me on the Berlitz method for teaching a language and he put me into a school where we were sent out to teach the executives and secretaries of American companies. It was there where I first set eyes on Rosemary. We were married the next year. I was 25 and Rosemary was 23.

While working washing cars at Tilden-Rent-a-Car on Alberni Street in 1977 I was taking stroke improvement classes at the YMCA. A lovely woman from Montreal in my class found out I was a photographer. She asked me to photograph her. I did not know that she worked in the gift department of Holt Renfrew and that she placed my portraits of her in frames there. That led the whole Army & Navy Cohen family to hire me for portraits which ultimately took me from Vancouver Magazine fashion editor Gabriel Levy to art director Rick Staehling and editor Malcolm Parry. My magazine photography career began then.

The coincidences thanks to Vancouver Magazine, the Georgia Straight and the Globe and Mail have placed me facing with my camera many of the local (and foreign) politicians, celebrities, actors, persons of ill repute, etc, so that my files and my blogs are an extensive  history of the events of our city, a city with a poor memory for its past.                                      

Sunday, October 16, 2022

 

Mayor Jack Volrich -1980

 

Tonight 15 October 2022 I could not sleep (I am writing this 16 October) thinking about the significance, to this rank amateur in all things politics, of the win for Vancouver Mayor of Ken Sim.

In spite of my above statement my life has revolved on a few men of politics.

The first one was on 26 June 1966. I was a conscript of the Argentine Navy.  I was handed a 1906 Mauser and told to report to the troops surrounding the Casa Rosada, on Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Through a loudspeaker President Dr. Arturo Illía (a simple country doctor) was given 60 minutes to vacate the building. Forty five minutes later he went home in a taxi. The coup ushered in many years of repressive military regimes. In 1972 Illía gave a talk on the discrepancy between huge American company budgets and the small ones of Latin American countries at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana. I was a professor there. I met him and told him of my role in his unseating as Argentine president. With a big smile he gave me a big abrazo.

My second political experience happened when I was a beginning and inexperienced magazine photographer in Vancouver. Vancouver Magazine Editor Malcolm Parry and Art Director Rick Staehling dispatched me to City Hall in 1980 to a council meeting and told to take an unflattering portrait of Mayor Jack Volrich. My photograph became, I believe, my second Vancouver Magazine cover.

My next venture into city politics involved two men. One was the Southam  mediafortune scion Harvey Southam and his Equity Magazine Editor Mike Campbell (brother of future Vancouver mayor and premier Gordon Campbell). One day I walked into Southam’s office and told him that I had had a very pleasant lunch with Alderman (what they were called then) Bill Yee and that he could be Vancouver's first ethnic mayor." Southam looked at me, and with a smile on his face he replied, "Not while we are around."

Rick Staehling who by that time, 1987, was working at Equity in the presence of Editor Mike Campbell, told me to photograph Alderman Harry Ranking with a green filter (to make him look older, etc). Ranking was running for mayor against Campbell’s brother Gordon. To my complete surprise my photograph was a two-page spread with a huge banner headline Quietly Communist. The article was written by the right-wing Vancouver Sun columnist Doug Collins. 

 

 After that, with the increased influence of magazines in Vancouver, I photographed all the mayors except for the incumbent who just lost. I visited Mayor Sam Sullivan at his City Hall office many times as we were friends.

I was unaware of the power of city hall in their relation with developers until I met architect Ned Pratt. He accompanied me on a tour of my Kerrisdale neighbourhood that was systematically being torn down and so-called monster house were replacing what had been there. He told me, “I am sure that the folks at City Hall are being bribed.”

I know next to nothing about Ken Sim except that people I speak with all tell me (where do they get their facts?), “Sim is in bed with developers.”

An influential woman, elderly now, but still powerful, Nini Baird, has the theory that the increasing density of Vancouver is due to the isolation of the towns and cities of the interiors. With little future, with no railroads or buses, the folks there come to Vancouver for what they think will be a better life.My daughter who lives in Lillooet can only come to Vancouver in her car and for medical services she has to drive to Kamloops.

It was Premier Gordon Campbell who sold BC Rain to CN and then CN folded it. I believe that there are many spots between North Vancouver and Squamish where short double tracking would make it possible for trains going in one direction to wait while another was going into the opposite direction. The lovely Pemberton train station is now a café and the other lovely Lillooet station is empty.

Anywhere else, in developed countries, the isolation of Vancouver’s interior would be a scandal. Whistler can be reached by a bus but you must take it at the airport.

I remember well, at a lecture, that former Premier Mike Harcourt gave at the downtown campus of Simon Fraser University. He said, “To solve homelessness we have to build homes.” Will Premier-in-waiting David Eby and Mayor Ken Sim get together (do Vancouver Mayors and BC Premiers ever get together?) and build homes?

I have lived in two big cities, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, two smaller ones, Austin and Veracruz and I can state that Vancouver has become a pot-hole city with few rivals. Streets are rarely re-paved. Patches are placed on patches. Construction on Marine drive around Main has been going on for so long that the Egyptians could have done a quicker job. Buenos Aires I define as controlled chaos. Vancouver has to be uncontrolled chaos.

But then Vancouver, unlike Buenos Aires (in spite of its now 83% inflation the trains and the subways run on time and the streets are smooth), is a city where lack of foresight gave us a three lane Lions Gate Bridge and a four lane tunnel in Richmond.

We in Vancouver have to re-define the meaning of a ghetto. Folks who lived in our Chinatown lived there because they could not afford to live anywhere else. The immigrants who come in do not want to live there. They can afford to live where they want. Chinatown will become a museum and like our other museums, the Vancouver Museum and the Maritime Museum made irrelevant and forgotten.

A ghetto, now. is not one place. It is the surrounding outer areas of Vancouver or the Gulf Islands where people think they are able to purchase less expensive housing.

Vancouver in its day had City Planner Ray Spaxman. He had a vision for our city. Can Sim find someone like him to give our city a positive future? Architecture and political writer Sean Rossiter brought depth to reporting for Vancouver Magazine and the Georgia Straight. What publication or radio station will pick up where Rossiter left off?

Ray Spaxman

 Before Kennedy Stewart was involved in this election, months ago I would ask passers-by or people in restaurants if they could name our mayor. Few could.

Perhaps Ken Sim might become Ken "Terrific" Sim. My only advice to him is to study the accomplishments of a former mayor, Mayor Arthur Phillips. 

And I am sure that Bill Yee must be quietly smiling.