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| 19 September 2025 |
I may have been in my early 20s when I went to an art exhibit in Mexico City with my grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena. It was a show that featured a young Filipino painter. We faced a large painting of a Mexican huarache. My abuelita was visibly affected by its ugliness. She told this to the painter, who with a smile on his face said, “Ah, but the beauty of ugliness!”
I have never forgotten. Today I noticed that the bouquet of flowers that my cellist friend Marina Hasselberg brought a couple of weeks ago when she stayed in my guest room for a week was all wilted. As I began to throw them away in my green bin on the back alley I noticed the two rose blooms.
I know enough about roses, thanks to my Rosemary who gently pushed me to love roses, to note that they were probably one-stemmed red hybrid teas that probably came from Colombia.
Back in the early 80s, before Rosemary got me into the Vancouver Rose Society in 1990, I would have purchased such roses for Rosemary’s birthday. Of course now, once you are a snob, and I am one, I would never consider doing anything as banal as that.
And yet there was a beauty in these spent blooms. And so I remembered both my abuelita and my Rosemary.
And yes, there is beauty in ugliness.
