Top left H. 'First Frost', H. 'Dorset Blue',  H. 'Ben Vernooij' & on top right ' H. 'El Niño', below left H.'Halcyon' -  seen underneath on top left H. 'Paul's Glory' -  scanned 19 May 2023

Little by little my Rosemary steered me in directions I never thought I would consider. In 1987 she took me to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. It was boring, my seat was uncomfortable and I was forced to look at 100 slides projected that were all bad.

Rosemary prevailed and I fell in love with roses. Now with her gone when I look at my rose garden today May 20 , 2023 I see so many lovely blooms in the solitude of a life that I can no longer share with her.

In the garden her two favourite colours were blue and white. It was my removal of rose (a lurid Rosa ‘All that Jazz’ from a house that was going to be torn down and buying an orange Rosa ‘Westerland’ where I taught her that those bright colours could go well with her blues and whites.

Rosemary July 2020 - Anemone blanda

Of late I have been thinking of blue. I have been thinking of blue hostas. A few months before Rosemary died I had a right eye cataract removed. Until then I thought that our bedroom doors were cream. They were white as my cataract was like a yellow filter. Leaving my oficina one day I saw a blue hosta that was unearthly blue. I then understood, that minus the yellow of my cataract,, white was white and blue was blue.

A few days ago I was startled by an extremely blue Hosta ‘El Niño’.

I know that blue hostas reflect UV light particularly when they are in the shade. My friend Ralph Rinke sent me a link to something called uvindexapp He told me that on the day that El Niño had been very  blue the UV index in Vancouver had been very high.

In the beginning of the 90s, when I was buying blue hostas, I noticed that they were never as blue as in their catalogue pictures. The reason was one I instantly figured out. I am a photographer. Colour film, video, and digital cameras are more sensitive to the UV spectrum that we humans do not see.

When Nixon debated Kennedy on October 13, 1960 I watched it in our poolroom at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas. Nixon lost because he looked terrible. He did not use Max Factor makeup that blocked UV (particularly the UV lighting of TV cameras). The UV  penetrated his skin and showed all his blemishes.

I am still shaken after having read Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking which she started two days after her husband died. I am now reading, its sort of sequel, Blue Nights which was written after her daughter Quintano Roo died.

On the first two pages I found this which fits in with the blue theme of this blog:

In certain latitude there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur n subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about her and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming – in fact not at all a warming – yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximately finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of the nuclear reactors. The French call this time of day ‘ l’heure bleue.” To the English it was the “the gloaming.”  The very word “ gloaming”  reverbates, echoes – the gloaming, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour – carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience and actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. This book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

Joan Didion - Blue Nights - 2011

 For me, too, blue is a sad colour. When my Argentine girlfriend Susy called me one 1967 evening in Buenos Aires to tell me I was a man with no future and that I was not to call her back, I went into a deep depression. I thought that I had to hit rock bottom to improve. I played on and on the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. I do not remember if it worked.

With Y in Burnaby Dec 2007

As a portrait photographer I have been reluctant to take my self-portrait. But in my 65 years as a photographer I must admit that I have quite a collection. In that other century, the method was to place your camera on a tripod and either use a long device called a bulb or to use the camera’s self-timer.

In this century, thanks to smart phones, the self-portrait has deteriorated (my opinion) into prolific selfies which in the conventional lingo of now, is captured.

I was thinking about the above when I remembered a photograph that I took 16 years ago, using a bulb with my friend Y the professional dominatrix. She suggested the pose. I was reluctant as I have always had a code of ethics that I never touch my subjects, particularly when they are not wearing anything. Y persisted and I gave way. This is my favourite selfie, which for me is on the same league of one that I took, with a self-timer, of Rosemary and me in 1967 on Mocambo Beach in Veracruz.

With Rosemary in Mocambo, Veracruz 1967

All the above set me to think further. This is that in my life I have been influenced by one pushy woman (my Rosemary) and I would have to include the dominatrix who in the many years that I photographed her I learned a lot as to what makes us human.

Left not a selfie taken by Rosemary Jan 23 2018 & right Dec 1987

I would never be writing this in my comfortable oficina, in what is now my Kits home, with no money worries, had it not been for Rosemary’s financial acumen. That she plainly told us in 1975 that Mexico was not a good place for out two daughters to grow up in and that we were moving to Vancouver was a brilliant decision by the best pushy woman of my life.

In some strange way my two cats have inherited some of this from Rosemary. Without talking, or being overly pushy, they give me a reason for waking up in the morning and living my day.

Rebecca, Hilary & Lauren

Alexandra Elizabeth & Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward - 1968

I have a friend who constantly tells me I am repeating myself and he likes to add, “It’s been done before.”

In Mexico and in Latin America Mothers’ Day is always on May 10^th. Because of the different date in Canada I placed several old blogs on that theme last week.

I thought I would be original in thinking that today I could write a blog about the four mothers in my life. It seems I am repeating myself and I have done it before. Here is the proof.

Three Mothers & One More

Perhaps I can modify that blog by pointing out that of the four mothers in my life only one is left and that is my 50-year-old daughter Hilary.

She has two daughters. She is a very good mother. Additionally she reminds me of my own mother as she has her crooked smile and speaks fine Spanglish.

My mother, Filomena Cristeta de Irureta Goyena de Hayward

Of my first mother, the one that bore me I have written before how when I was 21 she told me that she loved me because mothers always love their children but that to that point she had never liked me. Somehow after a year in the Argentine Navy in a trip to visit her for Christmas she pleasantly informed me that I had changed and that she liked me.

An often repeated mantra by my mother was, “Alex, you will never understand as you will never be a mother.” By the time I figured out that I could have told her, “You will never understand because you will never be a father,” she was dead at age 61.

All her life my mother sacrificed her well being by spending the little money she had on private school education for . That she sent me to St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas in 1958 gave me a good liberal education and that is where I bought my first camera and eventually became what I have been for many years, a photographer that she would have been proud of.

My father was a journalist and my mother was a fine poet. Perhaps I inherited from them my own sort of decent talent to write.

Because my mother was a teacher and by 1950 my father had left the house, the person who educated me was my mother’s mother, my grandmother Lolita. She was an artist and constantly told me I was one, too. She used a modern method of never telling me not to do something but, “If you do this, this is what is going to happen.” Her fave was, “El que por su gusto se muere, cantando lo entierran.” If you wish to die because you want to,  a choir will sing at your funeral.”

With María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena

What is outstanding is that the third mother in my life, my wife Rosemary, met them both. My mother lived with us for a couple of years in Mexico City and she and Rosemary got along well.

She died in bed in 1971 in the presence of Rosemary and me. This was just another incident in our life that kept my Rosemary and I together.

Because Hilary, was a busy worker, Rosemary planned all kind of trips abroad with our granddaughters, and paid for ballet and music lessons. We both were Saturday baby sitters.

When I write that Rosemary was the fourth mother in my life I really mean that she mothered me. She did all the financial worrying, bought my razors, shampoo and toothpaste. She spoiled me as much as my abuelita did.

I don’t really understand people wishing other people a happy Mothers’ Day. For me it is an extremely sad day. Having talked with Hilary today was a high point. But one mother left, I’ll take it, is really not enough.

In my memory I remember being in the sixth grade in Mexico City and putting together a cardboard waste paper basket with an image of La Gioconda on it for my mother. It was as simple  as that. A real Mother’s Day (it seems that putting the apostrophe after the s is wrong) is a happy one, but only in my memory.

I can add that none of the four mothers in my life knew what it was like to be a father.

There is a vivid remembrance in me of being at the ABC Hospital in Tacubaya, Mexico City when Ale was born. Rosemary's doctor, Doctor deKanter, told us both, "Rosemary, you are now a mother but you must also remember that you are a wife, too." I believe that my Rosmary never forgot as she was a fine wife. She proved that for 52 years.