For most of my existence as a photographer I never considered myself to be more than that even though as a boy my grandmother said I was an artist as she was.

While I did earn a pretty nice living in Vancouver in the late 80s, 90s and the beginnings in the 2Ist century also as a writer, I have never considered myself a writer. To date I have written 6321 blogs but I don’t feel I am a writer. One reason is that I have never suffered what is called a writer’s block. Only writers have them.

These melancholy, wet cold days where I have been practicing bed rotting, I have not written blogs. I have a little notebook with many blog ideas. I don’t have a block. I simply feel desganado. This Spanish word translates as “without an inclination to do anything, eat anything, listen to anything, etc”.

The route of my desgane is that although 4 years and a month have passed since my Rosemary died, I cannot stop from feeling sad and remembering her all day, all the time. I find myself telling the cats, ¿Cómo están los gatos de mami y de papi? I talk to them and I often call out, “Rosemary,” to see if they will prick their ears. That they do I believe it has only to do with my raised voice.

Another belief of mine of why I feel like this is that I speak two languages. In English you can say, “She is not here.” In Spanish you say, “No está.”  To be in Spanish associates to be in a place and to be as to be in existence. So I think, “No es.” That translates to “She is not.”

I believe that language makes us be who we are. My constant going back and forth between English and Spanish explains by writer’s block that is not one.

Perhaps with this blog under my belt tomorrow I might get myself out of my bed and write all those blogs for which I have already written the ideas on what I will write about.

The purpose of the three photographs in this blog is that the little one with our baby Alexandra represents a photograph I took in Mexico. The framed one is one of the first I took in Burnaby when we moved to Canada in 1975. The one of the two of us, taken by our granddaughter Rebecca in August 2020 is the last taken of the both of us in our Kits home before she died.