George Waterhouse Hayward

"Muchas veces me siento solo. Pero tengo amigos, pocos pero buenos; tengo gente que me quiere. Y tengo además un refugio que no todos tienen y es el hecho de que esencialmente soy un escritor. Mal escritor, buen escritor, eso no importa. Lo importante es poder refugiarme en la literatura, eso es lo que más me ayuda a escapar de la soledad".

Jorge Luis Borges

Many times I feel alone. But I have friends, a few but good one; I have people that love me. And I have besides a refuge that not all people have, and this is that essentially I am a writer. A bad writer, a good writer, that is not important. What is important is to find a shelter with literature, that is what helps me to escape solitude. [my translation].

It is a paradox that my father was a journalist and all I have of him is a bit of his signature on his King James Bible. When he died one of the items in his pocket was his Libreta de Enrolamiento which was his identity document. I was too stupid to keep it and I returned it to the authorities. It had his writing.

In a trip back to Buenos Aires in the 90s I went to the Buenos Aires Herald where he had worked as a journalist and found nothing in their files.

My mother told me that my father was a good writer who would write pieces on Perón that Perón did not like so my father spent weeks in a political prison called Villa Devoto.

My mother was a fine poet. I have a large collection of her poems.

Perhaps then, I might have inherited something from my parents which is why I write. My first article was a cover article for Vancouver Magazine in 1982 when I wrote my experience of participating in a coup when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy.

After that I often wrote for that magazine, for Western Living, for the Georgia Straight, for the Tyee, for the Province and for the Vancouver Sun. I wrote travel stories as magazines would save on that writer plane ticket as I was the photographer and writer.

But it was in 2006 when made my webpage that I started my blog. I was unsure what exactly that was supposed to be. Since then I have been writing about my personal experiences of my past but also of events here in Vancouver. To date I have written 6618 blogs. I like to use the Spanish word for a ship’s log and I call my blog a bitácora.

On of my mentors from Vancouver Magazine says I am a lousy writer and that I need an editor. I take Borges’s words that it is not necessary to be a good writer. You fight and I fight solitude with my daily routine. That, my photography and plant scanning keep me distracted from my melancholy in not having my Rosemary with me.

I just wish that somehow I could reach my father and ask him if I am that bad of a writer.