Captain Beefheart

Because I have too much time to think, something that is always in my mind since I was a fan of Captain Beefheart and the lyric “Someone’s had too much too think” from his song Ashtray Heartaaa, I especially think of the meaning of words in Spanish and their equivalents in English. I think of word and their ramifications in how I use them. There are three in my mind a lot. These are route (routines), cycles and stages.

When I see a lovely blond woman in her early 20s (remember at 84 I am much too old to be a “viejo verde”or dirty old man) I smile. I see her as my Rosemary when I first saw her on December 15 1967. That was a stage in my life I cannot return to.

Some days when I have many activities I liven up and escape my melancholy. These come in cycles.

My route to some sort of sanity is to plan my blogs and put the ideas in my blog book that is next to my bedside table.

The route word reminds me of my friend Jim Christy (he has disappeared in Toronto, I believe) who I hired to build a red stone path in the back garden of our Kerrisdale home garden. He stopped at a place and asked me, “Alex , to the left is your garage door and straight ahead is the laneway gate. What should I do?” I answered, “Borges.” He knew exactly what route to take. Borges wrote a story, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan – or the garden with the bifurcating paths.

A note here. In Spanish the titles of books have only the first word letter capitalized. The same applies to the names of poems.

When I photographed Captain Beefheart we spoke of our love for Harris Tweeds

And here a photograph of one of my daily routines. Mid afternoon. I sit down at the head of my dining room table to read while having a large mug of  Earl Grey Tea. I adore my Lisbon made but available at my Safeway "natas". The silver device for serving butter at tea has been in my family since I was a little boy. I was never curious to ask my mother where it came from. The plate underneath it Rosemary and I bought in Guanajuato, Mexico.

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. Joan Didion

It has been impossible for me to escape the loss of my Rosemary who died 6 years ago. Because her cat Niña, now that her twin brother died in May, she has adopted me and clings to me all the time. This provides me with an almost guilt-free excuse to lie clothed on my bed with her and do nothing.

It is not doing nothing exactly as I am suffering a malady right out of Captain Beefheart’s Ashtray Heart lyric – Someone’s had too much to think. I do this lots.

After Rosemary died I read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking which she began to write the morning after her husband died at the dinner table. In the book she writes that she took John Gregory Dunn’s clothes to a store but could not take his shoes as she thought he might just come back and need them.

In my closet I have all of Rosemary’s shoes. I have an affinity for her shoes because we always went shopping together for her shoes and she often bought that ones I suggested. The shoe in the scan here we bought in a shoe store on Avenida Florida in Buenos Aires.

I have now written 7085 blogs and few of the ones since December 9, 2020 do not mention Rosemary and my melancholy. But Didion’s statement here is always in my mind. I am no Didion but I may have inherited a little from my father who was a journalist and my mother who was a poet. Sitting down here in my oficina to write this is a bit comforting as sharing my feelings of Rosemary somehow connect me to the woman she was.

After two years of studying philosophy under Ramón Xirau in Mexico City in 1962/63 I became a Platonist. I disagree with Plato who said humans could perceive perfection but not actually see it or experience it.

My technique to take my portraits, especially my family portraits (many of them framed and on the walls of my home) was to always put my camera at eye level. I rarely used a telephoto lens opting for a 35mm or 50mm which placed me close to my subject. I never asked them to smile and they looked straight into the lens.

When you see these portraits and the one here of Rosemary I believe I can plunge into their soul and perceive some of their spirit. To me that is perfection.

The photograph here of Rosemary I took in 1969. It is framed and on the opposite wall from my bed. She stares at me and keeps at it when I turn off the lights. I never asked her why she had this sad look on her eyes even when she might have had a tiny smile.

I will never know.

Alhambra

In my oficina I have extensive nicely kept in alphabetical order, all my negatives and slides. I have separate filing cabinet drawers reserve to writers, gardeners and our garden pictures, women, travel and two reserved to the family.

A few days ago I became upset when I could not find photographs I had taken when Rosemary, our daughters and I went to London, Paris and then drove from Madrid to Málaga in a rented car. I just had the date wrong and found them filed in the family file under the date 1985- Paris – London- Spain.

The negatives are pristine as are the prints I printed in my Burnaby darkroom (we moved to Kerrisdale a year later). One of the prints of the Sacré-Cour church in Paris had our young Hilary on the bottom left. Because I have a scanner I decided to scan it instead of scanning the negative. I find the deterioration of the print (not archival Ilford paper) lovely. The red prints here are scans of the original negatives that I colourized by adding yellow and red with my Photoshop 8.

Toledo from spot where El Greco painted his landscape

Near Toledo

Sacre-Coeur - Paris with Hilary

La Giralda in Seville - my daughter Alexandra in bottom

Bougainvillea glabra 24 October 2026

 

Some might say that I am obsessive about missing my Rosemary who died 6 years ago. As I see it they don’t understand what it is like to have been married for 52 years. In all aspects she was my intellectual equal except she was better at finances.

I noticed today that her Bougainvillea glabra that she planted in a pot was in bloom. It has been in my bedroom since she died 6 years ago.

Both of us were not religious but we did believe in a life spark or force. When I photographed my family I always had my camera close and at eye level and I would ask them to look into the lens. Somehow in those eyes that stare at me in so many framed photographs in my house walls, I can recognize that unique spirit or Platonic essence drawing me into them.

Rosemary and I both believed that when one of our cats would die we would immediately get a new (middle-aged) one. We both thought that something of the dead cat transferred into the new one. The new cat had something of the old cat in him (or her).

To this I can now add how melancholic I get when I look at some of her perennials still blooming in my fall garden. Are they Rosemary sparks beckoning me?

And so these little bougainvillea blooms have a little bit of Rosemary’s spirit, soul or spark.

I can sense her in them. And I cry.                          

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' and Aeonium - 23 October 2026

 

Poem 856 – Emily Dickinson

There is a finished feeling

Experienced at Graves—

A leisure of the Future—

A Wilderness of Size.

By Death's bold Exhibition

Preciser what we are

And the Eternal function

Enabled to infer.

One of my everyday routines in the growing season of my garden and until fall is my daily scanning of the plants. I started in the summer of 2001 and I may have at the very least 3000 of them. These scans I associate somehow with my Rosemary, my life and with poems of my favourite poets in English and in Spanish.

Today I saw that my Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ has yet to give up the ghost. I have a plant, a succulent Aeonium that was given to me by a visitor to my late spring open garden to the rose society. My old age is my only excuse for not remembering me who gifted it to me.

I learned Latin in my Roman Catholic boarding school in Austin in the late 50s so I like the sound of se finit.

At this time of the year I always think of Tsleil-Waututh Chief Len George. When he showed me around the burial ground in North Vancouver he told me that there was an idea that if you survived winter you would live for another year. He died on December 7. 

And it is only natural that apply his concept to myself. Will I be around to see the first blooms of A Shropshire Lad next year?

Centre left- Anemone hupehensis 'September Charm' and mystery perennial - 21 October 2026

 

When my Rosemary and I started gardening in our Kerrisdale garden in 1986 I was the amateur. By 1991 she had made me a rose enthusiast to parallel my almost obsessive passion for hostas.

Rosemary was a perfectionist. I mowed the lawn with a reel mower but she would still cut the edges close to our flowerbeds with scissors.

Often when we went to nurseries (and yes this was often) she would notice little details in little plants. She would insist on buying these. I called these Rosemary’s perennials. Now Wednesday, October 21 I noticed two little flowers in a pot that had four plant tags of plants that are no longer dead. This plant is healthy but since it has no tag I have no idea what it is. I decided to scan it with a plant that I bought this year that Rosemary would have instantly liked.

All I can now say is, “Thank God and Rosemary for little things."