Rosemary and Casi - Kerrisdale - Photographs - Amy Chin

Alex & Paul Leiz - Plata - Kerrisdale - Photographs Amy Chin

Few of my contemporaries would understand what it is like to live in a house full of framed pictures on the wall which I all took. And most are family portraits that parade in front of me the passage of time (55 years of which 52 I shared with Rosemary). Many of my subjects are long dead and yet the smiles of my mother and grandmother appear in my memory.

Rosemary for years had a tocador (dresser) with an oval mirror. She never ever sat in front of it to apply makeup. She always preferred to sit on the floor in front of our closet mirrors.

This dresser contained lots of intimate belongings of hers. She kept copious notes of all our trips abroad and had many notebooks where she jotted about her life in Mexico before she met me. Some of her notes make me blush. With her gone I feel it is okay to intrude on her privacy.

Yesterday in one of the little notebooks in the center (seen here) I found four photographs taken by my friend Paul Leisz’s partner Amy Chin. The pictures she took before we moved to Kitsilano from Kerrisdale some 6 years ago. I know this as one of the cats was my Polilla who died just before we moved and I buried her in our Kits garden. The other cat was Casi. He died of diabetes in our new house before we left on a trip to Buenos Aires. When we returned we went to the SPCA and adopted our orange and white siblings, Niño and Niña.

It is virtually impossible for me to explain the emotion I experience last night when I saw the portrait of Rosemary that I had not taken. It was almost like seeing somebody for the first time. I stared at it and immediately thought, “She was alive.”

Staring at Casi and Polilla was different. I have written many times here how cats have a Platonic essence I call catness or (new just now) felinity. It seems that as soon as a cat dies and one adopts a new one the essence of the former live cat is transferred to the new live one. I see in these portraits (I would never call them snaps) the souls(spirits?) of  my present Niño and Niña. That is comforting.

And thank you Amy for this late in acknowledgement gift.

Mexico City - 1969

I have yet to find anybody to understand my point that Artificial Intelligence is a stupid algorithm used (we hope) by an intelligent human.

While there are some who are hypercritical of Twitter/X I enjoy it because their algorithms have put me in touch with writers and others who write in Spanish and may be from Argentina, Mexico or Spain.

In one such tweet I saw a photograph of a movie house in Mexico City (the photograph was circa mid 50s) called the Chapultepec (below). It was on the corner of the fashionable Paseo de La Reforma bordering the Chapultepec Park (the grasshopper hill is the meaning of the word). 

In 1970 Rosemary and I had been married since Feb 1968 and we lived around the corner from the movie house on Herodoto Street. We wanted to see a film called The Music Lovers directed by Ken Russell, staring Richard Chamberlain (he played Tchaikovsky) and Glenda Jackson.

When we got there we were asked for our IDs. I was 27 and Rosemary was 25. I remember that Rosemary smiled and told me we could go back to our apartment to retrieve our IDs.

Some years later I photographed Richard Chamberlain in Vancouver. To break the ice I told him two stories. One was the one of The Music Lovers and the other as to why there is a famous brand of Havana cigars called Montecristo ( I smoked the Claro which cost 15 dollars in Vancouver for the foot long that it was). Cuban women rolled cigars leaves on their thighs while being read. Their fave novel was El Conde de Montecristo. Chamberlain was in the 1975 film.

The Montecristo Claros and two forestry barons

Richard Chamberlain - April 1998

Corvus, curva - Juan manuel Sánchez & Alex Waterhouse-Hayward 2001

I am not going to dispute if the big black birds that compete with the smaller birds in my deck garden for the bird seed I put out are crows or the bigger ravens.

In our Kerrisdale home in the late 60s, our neighbour Mrs. Alm, who lived across the street, would come out on hot summer afternoons and clap her hands in a futile hope the crows would stop making noise and go away. They never did.

One time I found a dying little crow on the street and I picked it up. Later in the day Rosemary and I went to vote for federal elections and we were swooped by what must have been the angry parents.

In 2001 my Argentine painter friend, Juan Manuel Sánchez  worked on what we called colaboraciones that mated my photographs with his drawings. The one here we called Corvus (the Latin name for the crow) curva (in relation to the nice curves of our model and friend Nina Gouveia.

Why is this bog about crows/ravens?

In this other blog I wrote about Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee. Poe has been in my mind. While nevermore is nunca más in Spanish there is a finality of the English word probably because of our knowledge of Poe’s poem The Raven. The protagonist of the poem is going mad in missing his Lenore. The raven shows up pecking at the window. Ravens can talk so we find out he is called Nevermore.

 A Stream of Consciousness to Annabel Lee & James Mason

Everything in my life, post Rosemary’s death on December 9, 2020 makes me think of the finality of that word and how my memories will remain so and will never happen again.

It would seem after her death that she was what bound our small family together. It is now crumbling before my eyes and I think “never again”, nevermore.

Karen Gerbrecht - violinist

It was during a Buenos Aires carnaval in 1950 when I noticed something that began my confusion on sexuality. I was with my parents in the Buenos Aires Subte (subway). Leaning onto the back of the car in front of us was a naked back. It was supposed to be a woman but it did not look like one. How was I to know at age 8 that it was a man dressed as a woman?

Since then the backs of people, especially that of women, have been in my mind when I pick up a camera.

My grandmother Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena was born in the 19^th century and lived in Spain. Her vocabulary was full of cautionary  euphemism of the Victorian kind.

An espalda is Spanish for the back of the person from shoulders to waist. Thus a person’s back is not necessarily a clear term. My grandmother would say “donde la espalda pierde su nombre”. The expression plays on the exclusivity of the word espalda and it translates to the back of a person before it loses its name. This was her way of saying bum without using the word bum.

First violinist of the Vancouver Symphony (she may be semi-retired now) was a dashing readhead that I photographed many times. Here I will feature her back.

Today Monday is a day when I saw nobody and the phone never rang. My two cats, with their humane felinity, kept me company and prevented me from suffering soledad which in my books has an even more melancholic sound than solitude.

My youngest daughter has advised me that she might visit me on Friday. This solitude to me is so desperate that I am wondering if I might not go somewhere abroad to escape it.

Yesterday I followed on my Rosemary’s obsessions.  She had one that involved taking out a mop and bucket and doing our kitchen floor. The tiled floor goes as far as the entrance in a corridor. She would annoy me by finishing and then leaving the bucket and the mop by the fridge for days. I only now wish she were around to annoy me. My version is to get a large bowl with soap and water and with a brush I go at the tile grout. Only then with a large rag do I wash the floor which I have previously vacuumed well.

No matter where I move in this house her presence is everywhere.

I was reading an interview with Julio Cortázar who stated that the key to his writing was to use his imagination. My imagination these days seems to be a one-trick pony all about my missing my missing wife.

I am not sure that any of my relatives understand how terrible solitude and grief can be. Perhaps soon I may find something else in the corner of my imagination.

I fished out Rosemary’s wedding band which was badly repaired (it had originally baked blue enamel) and mated it with the iconic Polaroid portrait that I took of her in our early years in Burnaby sometime between 1975 and 1977. I chose it because she is wearing the ring.

I cannot use the word icon without remembering the first time I heard the word. Author William Gibson sometime in the 80s told me that he liked the Apple computer because it had easy-to-use icons.