Río de la Plata - Buenos Aires

I am going to get to silver in a roundabout way. When the Spaniards first arrived to what one day would be Argentina (argentum is silver in Latin), they called the vast and wide river Mar Dulce. Sweet in Spanish, dulce is used to describe water that is not seawater. Because of the colour of the river, it became el Río de la Plata and from there, when the Spaniards were ejected in the 19^th century, my country of birth became Argentina.

Since I was a little boy I assisted my mother is polishing our silver with a product called Silvo. They still make it but when I checked under my kitchen sink I found something called Twinkle.

We had a lot of silver including one of the few valuable gifts that my father gave my mother which was a set of silverware.

Now in this 21^st century it has been many years since I took out my father’s silverware. I polish all the silver I have feeling sad that my daughters and granddaughters will have no use for it.

To this day I can remember the smell of Silvo and how my fingers became black. I remember as well the smell of Brasso which we used to polish all other metals including Chilean ashtrays (what will become of them?).

Polishing metal as a little boy and polishing silver by Rosemary’s gentle command, was a social event. Now when I polish all that silver, I feel melancholically alone and all the thoughts of that boyhood past come to haunt me.

I especially remember my little silver-haired cat called Plata. She died a few days before we moved from Kerrisdale to Kitsilano. When I told my youngest granddaughter Lauren that I was a going to bury Plata she said, “Papi you are going to bury her in the new house.” She was right and I did.

Plata

 As I wrote the above I kept getting a memory that began "Of silver..." I looked everywhere for a poem that began with that an got nowhere. Then I went to Google and put "of silver, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward and found a link to a blog I wrote August 12, 2023 which is very similar to this blog. So, yes I am repeating myself. But ther is a bonus as the "Of silver..." is the beginning of a wonderful enumeration by Cuban magic realism writer Alejo Carpentier

Of silver the slender knives