Rosemary and fading hosta leaves - 4 October 2026

 

The word fade has a beautiful equivalent in Spanish – desvanecer. It derives from the Latin evanescĕre.

Because of my age (84) I have some memory problems and I have to use tricks especially for remembering names. It was recently that I found out that it was Dorothy Parker who coined the expression – “What fresh hell is this?” To remember her name I think of a Vancouver friend Dorothy Barkely and then I connect with a Parker Pen.

By my Epson printer I have these two hosta leaves in which I placed a b+w inkjet transparency and then between two pieces of glass I exposed them to three hours of hot afternoon sun. The resulting image was made by chlorophyll interacting with the sunlight’s ultraviolet light. I call it a chlorophyllograph which makes me a chlorophyllographer!

My scan which shows the fading images and an inkjet transparency of a portrait that I took of Rosemary in 1969 represents a kind of fading. That portrait, framed is in front of the wall opposite to my bed. When I am in or on my bed she stares at me and when I turn off the lights she persists.

Why is it that I remember so well what she looked like when she was young and my image of her in bed 6 minutes before she died when she asked me, “Am I dying?”; is fading? Is it because I must remember and do remember her at the peak at her beauty when I was yet to understand who she was?

I look at all my family portraits on the walls of my house and I think that when I meet my oblivion will anybody care? 

Slowly but surely legacy for me is a rapidly fading concept.

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad ' 1 October 2026

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 28 September 2026 (earlier version of the one above)

A couple of days ago on September 28 I scanned a lovely bloom of my English Rose, Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’. It is one of my best roses and it also is great fall bloomer. After I scan my roses I put them into little vases and put them on my dining room credenza. Today when I returned from a day’s drive showing my San Francisco friend Jorge Urréchega I noticed the single bloom. I saw in it past due look a beauty that my friends from the Vancouver Rose Society would not accept. For them roses have to be at their perfection peak.

As an 84-year old man who is obsolete, redundant, retired and inconsequential, am I past my peak?

I believe that I am an artist and that I have to keep doing my stuff and only stop when that definitive end of my efforts will be my death.

While the old rose in the vase is not growing, it is slowly going in a similar direction as that of the man who cut it from its life-giving shrub. For me the transformation is a thing of beauty.

I feel the same of my Asahi Pentax S-3 I bought used in 1962 at Foto Rudiger in Mexico City. Even by then the black enamel had rubbed off to expose its brass body.

One of nomenclature changes in photography in this century that I abhor, is that photographers do not call their cameras, cameras. They might ask a new friend, “What kind of gear do you own?” These newish photographers see their pristine cameras as museum pieces which the coddle but do not seem to used them for what they were intended which is to take photographs. A term for these photographers is – gear heads.

There is a tidy purpose in a camera that looks like it has been used (an my Asahi Pentax indeed has been used and I keep using it) that favourably compares with my scan of the spent rose.

24 September 2026

When Rosemary and I lived in Mexico until 1975, she would tell me of the lovely fall colour of her home town, New Dublin, Ontario. I had somewhat of memory of that because in my Buenos Aires as a little boy we had the four seasons. In Mexico it was only two - the rainy season and the dry season.

When fall arrived in our Vancouver gardens I can remember how Rosemary on her very flexible knees would cut back her perennials and the ugly (in her eyes!) yellowing hosta leaves. I waited until the last moment to prune my roses (hers, too) slightly as the heavy duty pruning is done in March.

Today is Thursday, 24 September. It is a grey and now rainy day. I am cold and I will have to connect my oficina heater. I am melancholy as no matter what season or day I miss the presence and company of my wife.

I do a lot of lying (not laying you Canadians!) on my bed with my  affectionate Niña and I postpone writing my blogs. Perhaps tomorrow I will fill the gap.

These three leaves I found right next to my parked Chevrolet Cruze this morning and I knew I would have to scan them as they are beautiful.

Fall with its soon to happen winter diminishes my every day scanning.  I might do some more. If not these three leaves are a great way to go.

The word autumn comes from the Latin word autumnus, which means the passing of the year.

The above is my only use for AI. I place a word followed by a comma and etymology into Google.

Jane Rule - Of Second Paragraphs

On Wednesday, I took my daughter Hilary to Burnaby, after making dinner for her in Kitsilano. On my way back I listened to a splendid Ideas on CBC Radio that was dedicated to Dorothy Parker. I was not aware that she had coined the expression – what fresh hell is this?. I then looked up her poem Resumé which is a funny take on suicide:

Resumé

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

That had me thinking of the pile of four books in my downstairs guest bathroom. I am sure that few if any of my guests would sit on the toilet and begin to read them. I have them there to remind myself of the importance in reading and in particular these. One of my faves which connects to Parker’s Resumé is Jane Rule’s Taking My Life.

Quite a few years ago, Books in Canada called me and the editor asked me, “Alex how would you like to photograph a 6 foot lesbian? I did and she charmed me.

It is that first paragraph that remains in my memory:

Writing an autobiography may be a positive way of taking my own life. Beginning in the dead of winter, mortal with abused lungs and liver, my arthritic bones as incentive for old age, I may be able to learn to value my life as something other than the hard and threateningly pointless journey it has often seemed. I have never been suicidal but often stalled, as I have been now for some months, not just directionless but unconvinced that there is one. No plan for a story or novel can rouse my imagination, which resolutely sleeps, feeding on the fat of summer. And so I take my life, with moral and aesthetic misgivings, simply because there is nothing else to do.

Lauren Elizabeth Stewart

At my age my memory plays tricks. There was a Transcend thumb drive on my kitchen island. I have no idea on how it got there. I connected it and found about 800 family photographs. Some I had not memory of having taken them. After a couple of trips to BestBuy I can now project them for a future family gathering. Before that happens I have been looking at each photograph and deleting duplicates; adding or subtracting contrast and colour correcting faces. This will take at least another week.

Because I started taking photographs of Rosemary when we were married in 1968 and then took photos of our daughters and later of our two granddaughters I don’t have hundreds of them. I have thousands of them.

While fixing these pictures I found these wonderful portraits of my youngest granddaughter Lauren holding stuffed animals. I am proud of them. They are not snapshots (instantáneas in Spanish), they are portraits. My Rosemary taught me to notice hands. Many of these feature them. Lauren is now 22 so I am sure she will smile when she sees these.

My grandmother whom I called Abuelita constantly taught me refrains from the Don Quijote de La Mancha and many more that she learned as a Little girl when going to school in Valencia  in the 19th century.

Sometimes she taught me stuff that was unkind. Of boring people she would say, “la  compañía del niño  muerto,” which translates to, “the company of the dead child.”

Eight years ago we adopted brother and sister cats that were called Mac and Cheese at the SPCA. They were about 6 years old. Rosemary and I liked to adopt cats that were middle-aged so that we could enjoy that mutual getting to know each other. I did not like the SPCA names so I named them Niño and Niña.

Niña became my cat and Niña adopted my Rosemary. They were our constant presence when we were in bed and they slept with us.

After Rosemary died on 9 December 2020 I found solace in the company of my cats. I would talk to them (mostly I Spanish) and I catered to their needs. This catering brought me a stability that I lacked in not having a partner, not needing to work and having too much time to think. One routine was taking Niño for his daily walk (no leash) around the block. Rosemary had taught him. Rosemary often told me, “When I am not around and you walk Niño be patient and don’t shout at him.”

On May 12 this year I woke up with Niño dead on my bed. It has been a devastating death ever so slightly ameliorated by the Niña’s constant warm presence. Somehow, and I am sure, she understands the concept of death. She has adopted all of Niño’s quirks (except walking around the block). I often ask her, “Do you remember Niño, Niño?”

She is my daily routine as is my daily bike ride. The bike ride divides the day and that activity adds a element of stability. I am not sure how I will handle the cold in December.  I would never bike in the rain.

I will have to cuddle with Niña on the bed and  we wil think of our Rosemary and Niño.

And so I can modify what my abuelita told me to , “Niña the company for a dead Niño.”