August 31, 2024 photograph by Ian Galsworthy

 

Being alone on my birthday is saddening. That was almost the case this year. My eldest daughter Alexandra had a dental implant on Thursday 29^th, and on Friday and Saturday (my birthday) she was not well. She was cared for by her sister Hilary. I was resigned to spending the day without company. At 4:15 I went out for a walk with Niño and ran into my neighbours Ian and Kathleen Galsworthy who were walking their dog Chunky. They wished me a happy birthday and invited me for dinner. I declined but added that tea would be fine. They told me to come back at 5:15. They had set up a table in the garden and on it was a small chocolate cake with a candle. Imagine this pleasant surprise! Their daughter Isobel who is about to go to study in Wales was present. I had good company.

At his point I would like to stress that through the years I have photographed many of our family birthday parties. But Ian’s photograph is my first for blowing a candle.

Thank you Kathleen and Ian. Isobel good luck in Wales.

30 August 2024

I recall a drunken birthday that happened many years ago when we were living in Burnaby. My Rosemary had gone to visit her mother in Brockville. I was on my bed on my birthday feeling very sad and lonely. I called up a friend. All I got was an answering machine so I sang “Happy birthday to me…” and hung up. I went downstairs and put some strawberries in a blender with some lemon juice and lots of rum.

On the bed I was really feeling no pain, but I did hear the door downstairs and Rosemary said, “Alex I did not want you to be alone on your birthday so here I am.” She came up and saw me in my condition on the bed. Her only comment was, “How could you do this?”

After all these years that have passed by I am now able to smile and only wish I could hear Rosemary open the door. It is not my birthday tonight. But it could happen tomorrow.

Alexandra Waterhouse-Hayward - 1978

 

There are words that when I hear them said or see them in print annoy me to no end.

Award-winning, at the end of the day, move forward, 99.9% pure, and those overused stunning and iconic.

I particularly despise the word upgrade which invariably means that whatever it is, it will be more complicated.

In this 21^st century photographers and phone photographers have abandoned the concept of Rembrandt lighting. Most Vermeers are painted in window lighting that show of the same one side of face light and the other dark. My portrait of Alexandra is an example of Rembrandt lighting.

What particularly upsets me is that the technology of the last century has been abandoned for the “better” technology of this one.

My mother used to tell me that anything framed is saved. In a frame going down my stairs I have these double portraits (they don’t both fit at the same time on my scanner) of 1978.

I went to visit a friend in San Francisco and I took with me an 8x10 print of my Alexandra in which I used Kodak b+w infrared film. Walking on Market Street I passed a place that made T-shirts. I walked in with my 8x10 and they made a T-shirt using a Xerox machine. Part of the output were these two lovely prints.They were about to throw them away but when I asked they gave them to me.

I think they are special. In this better and upgraded century I could not have stuff like that done again.                                                          

Rosa 'Darcy Bussell' 29 August 2024

When my father and mother moved to a house with a long garden in the Buenos Aires suburb of Cohglan in 1947, I was five. Within a couple of years my mother would invite my school friends and cousins to my birthday on August 31. By this date it is spring in Buenos Aires. She had the party in the garden and insisted on a Mexican piñata and putting a tale on the donkey.

I remember 1950, as my nephew (a year younger) Georgito O’Reilly, showed up and he broke all my gift toys. Since then we have been inseparable friends.

There was one additional problem with my birthday in that on the 30^th of August, Argentines celebrate the first Catholic saint of the Americas, St. Rose of Lima. On that 30 there is a famous (to this day) La Tormenta de Santa Rosa, or the Santa Rosa Storm. That meant that celebrating my birthday on the 31^st could be a problem.

Today as I was walking in the garden, I noticed this perfect red rose. No matter how accurate my scan is it does not do justice to its three-dimensional presence. I knew I had to scan it, nonetheless.

While other perennials or trees may have lovely flowers, including the white flower of a Magnolia grandiflora, nothing can compare to the presence of a perfect rose.

Plato famously wrote that we humans can never perceive perfection, a perfection of what he called his world of ideas. We see a filtered form of reality.

If Plato were around I would challenge him, as undoubtedly he never saw a red rose like mine. And I am glad to report that it promises to be sunny on my birthday.

Rosa 'Sexy Rexy' & Senecio candicans 'Angel Wings'  29 August 2024

When Rosemary and I started gardening in our large Kerrisdale corner garden in 1986, she was the gardener and I was the amateur. The garden had lots of shade. I looked up solutions and I kept reading about hostas.

Houses were being torn down all over our neighbourhood. Rosemary actively kept track. Once the house was to be demolished we would go in the late afternoon with our wheelbarrow and spades. In one garden Rosemary said, “That’s a hosta.” And that began my entry into gardening with that almost impossible-to-kill-plant.

In those early years Rosemary had her garden with many perennials, ferns and roses. I had my hostas. We would be annoyed when my hostas would creep in on her beds or her perennials into mine.

We soon discovered that the garden was our garden. It was at that point that I respected her amazing ability to find interesting plants.

Some of her faves where the gray plants, like the one in this scan.

Rosa ‘Sexy Rexy’ is now one of my faves since I replaced it after years of having disappeared from our garden.

I decided today that I would mate one of Rosemary’s fave plants and one of mine.

It is this sharing that was one of the key reasons we survived 52 years being married.

My cats, Niño and Niña and I, share those many moments that the four of us had in what almost seems it was not four years ago, but yesterday.

When the three of us are in the sunny deck, surrounded by what were our plants, I am certain that those two cats remember as well as I do.