10 September 2026

Because I was married to my Rosemary for 52 years, I miss an intimacy that I can never possess again. From making a bed, that we would then sleep, I have perceived many more. A few days ago I wrote a blog that involved a famous (and controversial) painting by Alex Colville called The Refrigerator. We often walked around with nothing on.

Alex Colville's Refrigerator

There was an intimacy that we shared for many years that many would say was unhealthy (unclean?). We liked to take tub baths together. We would be in opposite sides and our toes would happily do stuff.

But intimacy does not have to be only sexual. When we talked she often finished the sentences I began. I now miss being able to talk to a woman (not any of my male friends) about stuff like what me might need to buy at the supermarket or what we might want to cook for our evening meal. I miss walking around the block holding hands. I miss going to buy shoes with her. She often bought the shoes I liked. To this day those shoes are in my bedroom closet. The Swedes will have to come when I am dead to take them away. Something of Rosemary is in those shoes.

For 25 years we had breakfast in bed (with our cats). Breakfast came with the Vancouver Sun and the NYTimes. We would talk of our plans for the day.

Now I feel like a boat that is rudderless. Luckily, my female cat Niña, demands her daily routine of being fed, let out on the deck, and especially hearing the noise of my filling her two water dishes (one in the kitchen that other in the bathroom next to my room). As soon as it is 8pm, she stares at me. I open Rosemary’s armoire (she knows of the noise it makes) and I pull out and place in my hand some of her treats. After that she expects me to take a bath and get into bed to read. She immediately gets on top of me.

Often I can hear when I make the bed in the morning, “Alex, make the bed neat for the cats,” or “Alex the kitty litter has to be changed.”

While all this is happening, I keep looking at Rosemary’s framed portrait (the one here) and that Bougainvillea glabra that grows on a table by her armoire. Today it had some flowers and I knew I had to write about her favourite house plant (in Mexico City it grew in our little garden as it was warm enough).

That she planted it in the pot it is in, gives me that feeling of knowing that something of Rosemary is in that plant.

But the one special intimacy that I share with Niña is that when both Rosemary and Niño were alive (my male cat Niño died on May 12), she was her cat while Niño was mine. To stroke Niña, knowing that at one time that was Rosemary’s pleasure, is exquisitely melancholic. I talk to Niña and call her Niña muchi (a sort of Mexican endearment word). I say, “Do you remember Rosemary?” Or, I might say, “¿Te acuerdas de Mamuchi?

But the most tragic intimacy we share is that when Rosemary was dead on our bed on 9 December 2020 we (two daughters and two granddaughters and I ) were waiting downstairs in the living room for the funeral people to come and take Rosemary away. As I was thinking about it all, I knew that because I was and am a photographer, I had to do something. I had to take a photograph. I went upstairs, and there, was my Rosemary, dead with Niña sleeping on her chest. I took the photograph and it is permanently imbedded in my memory. I will never show it to anybody.

It is much too intimate.

Pacific 1967

Living in Canada since 1975 I soon became enamored with Canadian art. This includes Thom Thompson and The Group of Seven he inspired, Emily Carr (especially her pencil drawings) and Alex Colville. I had the pleasure to photograph Colville at the Rennaissance Hotel on October 15, 1995. I have written of my favourite painting Pacific 1967. Recently I discovered his awfully controversial The Refrigerator. I immediately knew I could write a blog connecting with my own experience with fridges.

In  Argentina a fridge is an “heladera”. In Mexico is it is a “refrigerador”.

Now in my Kitsilano home I experience my extreme dyslexia. When I want to reheat my tea mug in the microwave I often open the fridge door. My fridge door is excellent but it does not have that feature of magnetic door. Many of my Polaroids often ended on our Kerrisdale fridge door.

Rosa 'Robin Hood' - 6 September 2026

Rosa 'Robin Hood' is a reliable, repeat-blooming hybrid musk shrub rose bred by Reverend J.H. Pemberton before 1927.

Today, September 6, 2026 I have one bloom of my reliable Rosa  A Shropshire Lad’ in my back lane garden. I notice another, Rosa ‘Robin Hood’. This rose brings me many memories, some involving my father and another, my going to Nottingham in 2006.

In these pages I cannot stop writing on how I miss my Rosemary who died   6 years ago on 9 December 2020. It is impossible for me to look at this rose a hybrid musk rose without thinking of all the others hybridized by the Reverend J.H. Pemberton. Rosemary would have smiled had I showed her this scan or brought her to the lane garden to gaze on this little rose.

I am now 84 and it is impossible for me to explain that in a life without obligations except to feed myself and my female cat Niña, that thought in my head are all about the fact that I am waiting for my inevitable oblivion.

People, including my two daughters tell me thought stoppers, “Papi you have to find distractions to keep you busy.”

But I lie on my bed with my cuddly Niña and I feel I am in a doctor’s waiting room (I do have some magazines to read) expecting to be called in any minute.

Because I lived in Mexico for many years and with my Rosemary for 8 years the thoughts of death are familiar to anybody who has ever gone there.

One of my concerns is that I am surrounded by many mementos on the walls, my bed, framed portraits of Rosemary, my daughters, granddaughters and family. Most of these portraits stare at me without smiles. Any one of them, all, if I might say, are superb portraits. None are snapshots. I am unable to escape any of them or look at them without being transported to moments before I pressed the shutter of my camera.

When we lived in Kerrisdale, one day, Rosemary and I drove away to visit our Lillooet daughter, Alexandra. I told Rosemary, “Perhaps we might hire an arsonist to burn our house down while we are away.” Her answer, “That is not a bad idea. All would be gone and we could begin again without any tactile memories.”

But I remember what my abuelita told me, “Niños que juegan con fuego se mean en la cama.” Or “Children who play with fire piss in bed.”    

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad''  & Peter Trower -  3 September 2026

With Rue My Heart is Laden – A Shropshire Lad - A.E. Housman With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

In the 80s and early 90s a group of us (writers, editors, photographers, artists,  poets, strippers, novelists, etc) would meet for lunch at the Railway Club every Thursday. Such was for me the importance of this gathering that I tried to avoid accepting free-lance jobs that would interfere.

We had four poets that often attended; they were Peter Trower, Gerry Gilbert, Evelyn Lau and Jamie Reid. Reid affirmed he was a member of the Canadian Communist Party.

Peter Trower was often called our Logging Poet. It was he who introduced me to A.E. Housman and particularly his A Shropshire Lad.

In my rose garden in today’s date, 3 September, 2026 only one rose is in bloom. It is in my back lane garden. It is an English Rose, thus it is remontant. This means that it blooms more than once. In many respects it is one of two or three of my best roses. It is fragrant and one of its lovely characteristics is that its new leaves are bright dark red.

Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward

 

In the July 6-13 The New Yorker I read an essay Regression to the Mein – How Mirrors, selfies, and surveillance what we make of our faces by Cal Reverly-Calder.

This paragraph caught my eye:

Only with the Renaissance would it break again, with the fifteenth-cenutury blossoming of the naturalistic portrait: van Eyck, Campin, Piero della Francesca. The archetype of painted interiority may still be the good old “Mona Lisaa,” known in Italian as “La Gioconda”- the face that launched a thousand conjectures. Bound –Alberti brings her in dutifully, to say how “enigmatic” her smile is, though Wigginstein, again, made more of the cliché. “When we speak of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, that may well mean that we ask ourselves: In what situation, in what story, might one smile like that?” To talk of stories, he means, is to talk of time; you need the before and the after, the rounded sense of life. After all, some people laugh in anger and weep with joy. If I read your smile, as happiness, I’m drawing on a fluid sense of the character I know, and on our place in an emotional culture. One reason Leonardo’s painting has endured in the popular imagination is straightforward: we want to ask questions of her – how she feels, what she’s thinking – and though we don’t believe she’s alive anymore that we believe Hamlet or James Bond to be alive, we can’t help responding to her face as if she were.

My Gioconda will always be my Gioconda. One of the images of the four here (the one on the right) stares at me enigmatically from the framed photograph on the opposite wall from my bed. She stares at me and keeps on when I put out the lights.

I never did ask her why she often had those sad eyes when she posed for my camera. I had plenty of time to do so as I took these photographs (she was nude, they were my first nudes) in Mexico City sometime in 1969.

Nobody will know why the Mona Lisa smiled and I will never know of her sad eyes.

These photographs are the result of putting a strip of two pictures on top of the other and then I scanned them with my Epson V700. I then  joined them by using Photoshop layers.

No AI.