Rosa 'Bathsheba' 27 October 2024

While it really is a private matter since this blog is really a “Dear Diary”-kind of writing, It would be disingenuous of me to not admit to missing all those things Rosemary and I did in bed. Yes we did watch some TV, read the papers, pet our cats, discuss finances and plan trips. Yes. But I also miss all those gentle escapades that as we got older became ever more gentle.

I was thinking about all that last night in my bed with Niño and Niña right next to me. This happens every night as I sense that empty spot on my right on the bed. She was always there for 52 years.

Because of my Bunny Watson type of association the idea of chopped onion came into my head.

I make fabulous mashed potatoes. I use cream, lots of butter and I whip up the mixture with an electric beater. I like to add freshly ground pepper and grated Parmeggiano-Reggiano cheese. There is an additional ingredient that is most special. When I first met Rosemary she told me that her mother would chop up raw onion and put it into the mashed potatoes towards the end so that they would not cook too much. The final recipe for mashed potatoes involved both our families.

I make fabulous mashed potatoes. Rosemary called them comfort food. Last night the idea that sex with Rosemary was a frequent comfort that always had a bit of edge led me to thinking up the scan you see here. Why do I have Rosa ‘Bathsheba’ in it?

Our sometimes edgy sex did also have a gentleness. This rose, about to open, somehow reminds me of Rosemary when we closed the lights or in those mornings when we shared lazy, slow and gentle sex. This is something we did until a couple of months before she died.

Yes, mashed potatoes.

Idle worry over future times,

Idle worry over future times

does not trouble our gentle slumber;

ambitions not triumphed over us

From Handel Aria 8 “In den agehehmen Büschen” HWV 209

My good friend, graphic designer (important in this blog at the end) Graham Walker and, I attended tonight a baroque concert at St. Augustine Catholic Church here in Kitsilano not too far from my home on 7^th Avenue.

These concerts are organized by a young violinist with an impressive curriculum (Julliard, no less!). She is Majka Demcak (in the next concert I will have to ask her how to pronounce her name). Any baroque concert that includes Nan Mackie on viola da gamba and Christina Hutten on harpsichord is a must to witness in my books.

The surprise was the young soprano Chelsea Kutyn. She was astounding and she had this infectious smile when she sang the Handel arias that my daily depression was relieved while she sang.

I have to now point out that she sat in front of me. At her pew she had two hard candies and a thermos flask. That was not all that unusual. But from my vantage point I could see her back, her lovely black dress and strap and her lovely hair. I obsessively photographed this!

After the concert I went back to show the quartet a photograph/illustration that Graham Walker and I did of the prolifically fantastic  violinist of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra. That Majka Demcak is part of that group now is most commendable. To find out about the next concerts on the series you can sign up to Majka Demcak's email. [email protected]

Marc Destrubé as Vivaldi - Photo Illustration Graham Walker & Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Senecio Greyii Brachyglottis - Rosa 'Susan Williams-Ellis' 25 October 2024

I told an Argentine lieutenant commander, “I absolutely refuse to obey your order.” His answer, “In time of war I could have you shot or I would send you to the Argentine Antarctic and the only women you would meet would be penguins. But I will do you two favours. One, I will have you arrested and you will spend a week in the navy brig next door. Two, I will advise you that you go now to a bookstore and buy some books. You will have time to read them.”

I went to Pigmalion on Calle Corrientes. It sold books in every language except Spanish. My parents bought their books there in English as well as Jorge Luís Borges.

When I arrived I found two books. One was Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld. The other was The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. While there there, I spotted an older man with poor vision. Because I was an ignorant conscript it was only months later that I figured that the man was Jorge Luís Borges.

 Markings were intimate notes that were found inside Hammarskjöld’s desk after he died.

 When I started by Blogger blog in 2006, ancillary to my web page in 2006, I saw it as a “Dear Diary”.  Joan Didion in an interview with the New York Times said this: 

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

This means that I write for myself even though I post links to my blog in several social media sites. It is irrelevant what people opine or if they limit themselves to emojis.

These last four years, after my wife died on 9 December 2020 many of my blogs have relevance to what I feel by my loss. I have no concern when people come up to me and say, “Alex why do you keep writing that depressing stuff?”

 As I get older the idea of worrying about my legacy has become unimportant except for my blog. While I am certainly no Hammarskjöld my blog is my “Dear Diary” on an internet-cloud desk.

I worry about how to preserve it.

Hotel Gèneve - 18 December 2012

Homero Aridjis - UBC Faculty Club - Spring 1993

Early December of 2012 I told Rosemary, “I have to go to Mexico City because our friend and Hilary’s godfather, Raúl Guerrero Montemayor is dying of prostate cancer. Can I borrow one of your black bras?”

That journey that took me to go to Mexico City with a Rosemary’s underwear in my suitcase began in 1993 at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty Club. Mexican poet and novelist, Homero Aridjis, was there for a talk courtesy of the Vancouver Writer’s Festival. I photographed him and wrote about him for Celia Duthie’s The Reader. From that point I realized I had to read as many of his books as I could. I can state here that I have read all of his books.

 

But there was a poem, Turista de 1934/Tourist in 1934,that I discovered about a Mexican gent bedding an American gal on a bed at the Zona Rosa’s Gèneve Hotel that inspired me to photograph Rosemary’s bra at that hotel.

On this Thursday, 24 October, 2024, there was Writer’s Fest program on Granville Island in which George McWhirter (Irish poet/novelist and first Vancouver Poet Laureate) & Chilean poet and writer Carmen Rodríguez discussed the complexities of translating and in particular translating Homero Arijdjis’s poems into English.

For fun I printed the picture of Rosemary’s bra and circulated it with the audience.  I then asked McWhiter to explain the circumstances. Since I had warned him about this, he handed me a neatly printed little paper containing Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid’s poem called Maidenform in Spanish and with his translation into English! 

And so one photograph to illustrate two poems.

The poem Tourist in 1934 is in this blog  

And here is Said's poem Maidenform

Maidenform

Barquilla pensativa,

recostada en su lecho,

amarrada a la orilla

del sueño.

Sueña que es desatada, 

que alza velas henchidas, 

que se desata el viento, 

que desata las vidas.

Maindenform

Thoughtful little boat,  

laid out on the bed, 

moored to the shore

of sleep.

She dreams she's cast off, 

sails at full stretch, 

the wind up, 

that she unhitches lives.