In 1951 my mother took me to see the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir with Rex Harrison, Gene Tierney, George Sanders and Natalie Wood as a child. Because I was 9, Harrison’s booming voice did not scare me. I loved the film and fell in love with Gene Tierney.

I saw the film again in Mexico with my mother and with my Rosemary. In Vancouver some years ago my daughter Hilary says we saw it together.

Obviously there is some memory and a consistent tradition with this film and my family. While I live alone with two cats since my Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 I am lucky to have two daughters. Alexandra who lives in remote Lillooet I don’t see too often, but my younger daughter Hilary who lives in Burnaby I see once a week.

Luckily (again!) she is a snob like her mother and her father. She likes to see good films, particularly the ones with little violence. And so it was that on Tuesday she screened The Ghost and Mrs. Muir on her TV after we had dinner. I brought the ravioli and she made the salad.

Somehow it was almost like we were seeing the film for the first time as we forgot some of the details. That made it even more fun.

We both noticed that the prominent portrait of Harrison on the film compares ever so nicely with the portrait of Gene Tierney in the 1944 film with Dana Andrews, Laura. Famously Dana Andrew’s character falls in love with Tierney by just seeing her portrait. He is told that she is dead. We know better!

Dana Andrews the ultimate film noir actor 

Hilary and I will be seeing Laura next. I will be bringing a Safeway barbecued chicken for dinner.

I fell in love with Tierney in 1951 and that emotion was not repeated until I saw my first Grace Kelly film, Rear Window, Eva Marie Saint in Raintree County and Audrey Hepburn, in Roman Holiday. To this day Eva Marie Saint must have been in my mind when I fell for my blonde Rosemary.

When Rosemary and I had a garden in Kerrisdale I purchased Rosa 'Sexy Rexy' as I thought it had been named after Rex Harrison. That was not the case. That rose grows in my Kitsilano garden. Guess who I think about when I see it in bloom?

Rosa 'Sexy Rexy' 

Thank you Hilary for the memories. 

Marc Destrubé & Alan Storey

Since journalism in Vancouver became moribund some years ago the promotion of cultural events has declined. Publicists as well as journalists are now obsolete.

There is one solution to this dilemma. It is to get on cultural (music, dance, theatre, art) email lists. I am in several. Two important ones involve the leader, violinist Marc Destrubé of  both the Microcosmos Quartet and La Modestine (named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s donkey on his trip through Europe).

Here are the web pages for those two groups.

 Microcosmos Quartet 

La Modestine

Upcoming Microcosmos House Concerts and Program

I will not be missing one of the house concerts (they repeat the same concert in various homes within a week or two. It is the Microcosmos Quartet playing in the house of multi-talented artist/architect/etc Alan Storey. I wrote about a previous one at his home here.

Before I ever went to a Micrcosmos Quartet concert I would not have been caught dead listening to Béla Bártok. I found his music dissonant and cold. That all changed when I watched the quartet’s four warm musicians (with smiles on their faces) play the Bártok Quartets.

Microcosmos Quartet & Béla Bártok

These concerts are not expensive and they involve food and drinks. In the case of Storey’s house it is filled with stuff you want to ask him about.

Story is not the only NOY one-trick pony. Marc Destrubé plays both the gut-stringed baroque violin but also the modern stringed instrument. He is a born teacher so at every concert you will learn something new. It was he who told me that the horse-hair used in a violin bow is from a male horse’s tail. It seems that female horses urinate on their tales and that makes their hair unusable. 

In a recent  La Modestine concert, organist/harpsichordist Marco Vitale told us a fact that amazed me. It seems that in a harpsichord when the keys are pressed the instrument's mechanism goes up but is unable to come down if there is no gravity. Vitale then added, "Harpsichords cannot be played on the moon."

And because Vancouver is a city with a poor memory for its past guess who designed and built the pendulum in the Pendulum Gallery?

Aconitum carmichaelli 'Arendsii' 1 October 2025

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty declares to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

With my roses waning I happily can still use my scanner thanks to some of the other plants like this hosta and the aconitum. Because Rosemary’s favourite colour in the garden was blue she planted lots of aconitum that that have the pleasant feature of blooming in the fall.

My friend, now gone, Wolfram George Schmid who wrote the best book on hostas gave me one tip which I am not aware most people might know. He said that if you put a yellow plant next to a blue one, both colours will be enhanced.

Yellow hostas like this one, Hosta ‘Midas Touch’ are sometimes called gold hostas. As the season progresses and particularly if they get sun they become albescence which is another term that Schmid taught me. Some hostas turn yellow from green. In that case they are lutescent.

I miss my Rosemary because she urged me to learn botanical nomenclature. There are few people, now that heavy duty gardening is in a decline, who are interested in it. How many know that roses do not have thorns but have prickles. 

There is something that few know about German-born Wolfram George Schmid. Before he retired to his garden in Atlanta he designed launching pad platforms for NASA. 

Rosa 'Sweet Juliet' and Hosta 'Forbidden Fruit' 30 September 2025

As I scanned at this rose and hosta leaf I came to the conclusion that spring represents to me hope, summer is happiness, fall is reflection and winter is death. Chief Len George told me years ago that the Indigenous Peoples believe that if you survive a winter you will live to see another year. I am keeping my hope.

Chief Len George & Winter 

This rose I do not believe will be the last one of the season. I just might get lucky. I was sad scanning it as whenever a season began Rosemary and I discussed its ramifications. We reflected on the season past and planned the season to come. Alone with two cats I can no longer do that. The changing of a season somehow becomes a lonely experience.

And of course, as I write this I am wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt. I might have to turn on my heater in my oficina.

 Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold - William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

My hands

One of the tragedies of curiousity is that when you are curious enough to ask the question, the people who can answer it are dead. That is the case with my grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena who died in 1969 in Veracruz when she was 77. One of those infrequent miracles is that my Rosemary was able to meet her while she was alive.

My memory of where she was born is spotty. I believe that she was born in Manila but she studied school in Valencia.

This morning when I woke up at 10 am, after a bout of insomnia, I looked over to the window where I have a healthy bougainvillea that was Rosemary’s. I do my best to keep it alive feeling that something of her is alive in that plant. That got me to thinking of the problem of all the possessions that I have in my small Kits home and what I can do to alleviate the problem of having my daughters sifting through them when I die.

Rosemary in Buenos Aires 23 March 2017

My thoughts drifted to contrasting the plant on the bedroom table, the plants in my garden with the objects in this scan. What are they?

The bracelet was my grandmother’s mourning band (silver and black coral) that she wore for a year when my grandfather Don Tirso de Irureta Goyena died in 1918 at age 30. The silver goblet was my grandmother’s school drinking glass. Years ago I used it as my “toothbrush glass” in the bathroom. The little container was her school sewing kit. For me these objects are valuable because I knew the woman who owned them and who was one of my mentors until she died. Will my daughter’s find any value in these? What will they do with them?

On my father’s side I have a very large wool Argentine flag that was his from at least 1938. Who will want it? Can I just put it in the garbage? Occasionally I sip my mate from his mate gourd which dates to the 30s. 

All the above, boils down to that saving what is alive is far more valuable than that which belonged to the dead.

Am I right? What would my Rosemary have told me? I keep her shoes in our closet. Would she have kept mine?