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| Buenos Aires - 31 August 1950 |
"We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space,time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life." Harold Bloom - How To Read and Why (2000)
That above statement is now constantly in my thoughts.
Because my Manila grandmother lived with my mother most of my life and she died in 1970 I was very attached to my abuelita. In my present house besides having her photographs I have some of her personal stuff including a silver drinking cup when she was a little girl in school.
I agonize what to do with her possessions as I am not sure that my daughters or granddaughters would value them. I wrote a blog about it (link above) and sent it to a first cousin in Buenos Aires who shared our grandmother. He answered coldly without asking me about the possessions and told me that if nobody wanted them just to throw them away.
Whenever I call anybody I know I am met by a universally provided Telus answer. Generally I just hang up. I remember many years ago that one of the members of the CBC Vancouver Radio Orchestra had a hilarious answering machine message. It was funny and not clinically cold.
Perhaps my anguish on this coldness has to do that I lived for many years in Mexico where there is a lot of affectionate human contact universally known as “the abrazo”.
As the days get shorter and I must now wear long-sleeved flannel shirts I am not looking forward to my hermetic life with my two cats.
To illustrate this blog my Uncle Tony (my mother's broother) took the photograph at my 8th birthday in our home in the Buenos Aires barrio Coghlan. How was I to know then that all those smiles one day would be wiped by death or Bloom's imperfect sympathies.
The boy on the left in shadow was my friend Mario Hertzberg. He lived across the street. One day when I visited him I spotted a framed photograph of him. I inquired. He told me it was not him but of his brother who had died in a concentration camp in Germany because he was Jewish. It was my first awareness that the world was not just full of smiles. It was that same year, 1950, when my mother as she was combing my hair said, "Alex your fleco (bangs) on your head makes you look like Hitler. That was the first time I heard that name.
At about that time he and I were walking one day to the train station and we were stopped by a Capuchin monk. He greeted us and asked us if we believed in God. We were affirmative but I pointed out that Mario was Jewish. With a big smile the monk said, "That makes no difference since we all believe in the same God."
Take that 21st century!
I'm in the centre, bottom row, and my father top left.
