New Year’s Eve in Vancouver this 2024, was a letdown. Increasingly this city is becoming sterile. It has no flavour. I fell asleep at 12:05 after I heard about 5 puny firecrackers.
My idea of a wonderful New Year’s was the first I had with my Rosemary in Veracruz on December 31 1967.
I had met her about two weeks before, so I had taken her to show her off to my mother who was a school teacher (a one room school house in her house). Her students were the children of the engineers and employees of Alcan.
Rosemary immediately had a problem coping with the heat and humidity of Veracruz so she took many showers and sometimes she would yell to tell me that there were flying cockroaches in the bathroom.
Since we were not yet married my mother gave us separate rooms. I checked the doors. One squeaked so I oiled it. I believe that since our fist daughter was born 9 months later I can guess how it happened.
Both Rosemary and I noticed that in comparison to the 73250 ft altitude of Mexico City, sea level in Veracruz carried sound better. Sounds were louder. We would go to the lovely café La Parroquia which was in the Zócalo kitty corner with the main church. We would sit under the outside portales and marimba groups would play. With a little tip I could coax the players to sing a song on the spot that would contain the name of Rosemary and that she was a blonde.In the record scanned here, a record of my mother's that was recorded in 1940 it contains a honest and authentic La Bamba where each member of the group (they all have different voices) they all sing extemporaneously and make up the words as they sing.
The old trams would pass by and the noise of their clanging added to the charms of the port city of Veracruz.
But it was on New Year’s Eve at the stroke of midnight that all the ships of the port, in unison would play their sirens.
These sounds are the sounds of a real New Year’s Eve, my first with that blonde called Rosemary.
