Hilary Anne Stewart

As a young boy in Buenos Aires I remember when my mother and I took the number 35 tranvía from our Coghlan home. It snaked its way to her downtown apartment on Saenz Peña. On the way we passed the Villa Devoto Penintentiary where my father would spend unscheduled holidays courtesy of Juan Perón who did not like what my father wrote about him in the Buenos Aires Herald. A couple of years ago I even remembered Abuelita's apartment number. My mother wrote about the 35 in one of her poems:

I thought I'd never miss: -
The interminable wait for tram 35
The long & never ending route it took,
But I do
And I remember. - Filomena de Irureta Goyena Hayward

My mother often told me of that special comfort she felt in my abuelita’s apartment when we went to see her together. Somehow it was home for us.

Today my youngest daughter Lauren is coming for dinner. I do my best to repeat (I hope) in her a sense of comfort in her visit. I will serve her Rosemary’s Yorkshire pudding, a tomato and lettuce salad and we will drink freshly squeezed blood orange juice.

To get here from her job in Burquitlam, she has to take a Skytrain and a bus. Perhaps not that old Tram 35 but almost as arduous.     

The two portraits illustrating this blog (that first one I would title “The Baby from Hell” are of a b+w negative strip I found a few weeks ago buried with others. It is terribly under-exposed and even though I re-washed it, scratches and other stuff have remained. 

 To me what is unbelievable is that I took those pictures around 51 years ago. Hilary is now 52. While it really does not affect me I wonder what will happen to all those digital camera and phone pictures that people are taking now? Where will those photographs be in 50 years?