Rosemary & Niño 22 March 2020

I have witnessed death three times. I will elaborate after the introduction below.

Two events in 1950, when I was 8 in Buenos Aires, have affected me to this day. It was then that I became aware of death. My mother had taken me to visit my grandmother Lolita who worked at the Philippine Legation (not yet an embassy) on Calle Florida in the same building as the American Embassy. The American Embassy in conjunction with the United States Information Service (then an arm of the CIA) had a novelty in Argentina. This was a lending library where the miracle was that you could take a book home with you.

My mother left me in the library and somehow I found a magazine called American Heritage. Inside I saw photographs taken by Timothy O’Sullivan that showed Confederate soldiers of the American Civil Wall dead on the field. These dead soldiers, in stark black and white, looked like the many people walking in the mall that was Calle Florida, outside. I stared at the pictures and thought, “These men were alive many years ago and then they were dead.”

The second event was a purposeful one. Our neighbours had a teen age son who had crashes his motor scooter head on with a train on a level crossing. I was taken to an open coffin wake next door. The boy’s face was covered with bandages. I am sure my mother wanted me to learn what death was.

Reinforcing the above I had a Jewish friend called Mario who lived across the street. In a visit I commented that the photograph on the wall was of him when he was fat. That was not the case. Mario told me it was a portrait of his brother who had died at Auschwitz.

On a slightly lighter note, two families on our block (but across the street) had won the lottery. At age 8 I thought that only neighbours won the lottery or died.

From 1962 until 1963 I studied philosophy with at Mexico City College with Ramón Xirau Subías. Thanks to him I became a Platonist as I understood what Plato’s essences were all about. When we were studying the early Greek philosophers I thought that Epicurus was out to lunch when he wrote that we should not fear death as death is not painful. He added that we fear pain.

In 1972 my mother was on her deathbed. With my wife Rosemary present she said, “Alex I know all of you think I overact my sicknesses but this time I am going to die.” Rosemary and I heard her breathe in and she never exhaled. I could not find a doctor in our neighbourhood so a veterinarian wrote up a temporary death certificate. He looked at my mother and said, “Está muertita.”

My Rosemary was sick with multiple cancers in 2020. At least a week before she died on 9 December 2025 I would lie in bed with my back to her and my tears flowed and I tried not to make noise. I could not ask Rosemary what it was like to know you were going to die.

The day that she died in the afternoon, 6 minutes before she did she asked, “Am I dying?” I could not answer.

On 12 May of this year, I woke up with my two cats Niño and Niña in bed. Whe I touched Niño he did not react. I looked at him and his eyes were   blankly open. He had died not long before as rigor mortis had not set in.

In the past Rosemary and I had many cats. When one died we discovered that the best cure for the sadness of a dead cat was a brand new one. We would to to the SPCA and pick a middle-aged cat. We enjoyed the mutual adjusting that had to happen.

Before Niño died, when Rosemary’s Casi died and we adopted the twins Niño and Niña, I finally figured it out. Somehow a dead cat would transfer that essence of being a cat (Platonic!) into the new cat. My Portland friend Curtis Daily told me, “Alex, cats have the memory in their genes that they were stroked by Egyptian pharaohs.”

I am going to be 84 at the end of August and death is much in my mind. My family does not understand when I tell them that I feel that I am waiting. Rosemary and I both believed we would never see each other again. Thinking of Epicurus does not help. I think that we fear death because it is in our genes. It was Charles Darwin and more recently Richard Dawkins who championed the idea that we want to make sure our genes survive by having offspring. To try to think what it is to no feel, see, to be alive is against our genes.

My favourite composition by Argentine Ástor Piazzolla is Oblivion. As he was was raised in New York City as a boy he spoke good English. He gave the title of Oblivion to his composition knowing there is not transalation in Spanish. The closest is “olvido” or to forget. For me I find it interesting that in English “nothingness” is a close synonym. Nada is not close at all.

Up until my 70s with Rosemary as my ever present companion I still had photographic work. It kept me busy. I had no time for my present talent of bed rotting. I constantly remember, while on my bed and looking at the ceiling, that lyric, from Captain Beefhearts’ Ashtray Heart – Somebody’s had too much to think.

As time passes these days of feeding Niña in the morning, reading the NYTimes (on paper), going in my bike for an hour to Jericho Beach, scanning my plants and now approaching 7000 written blogs, I find that I feel a lack of utility to my family and friends. I am obsolete,redundant, retired and inconsequential (soon to be a country and western song.

And I wait.

Rosa 'Emily Carr' 30 July 2026

 

Bruscamente la tarde se ha aclarado Porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa. Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa Que sin duda sucede en el pasado. Quien la oye caer ha r ecobrado El tiempo en que la suerte venturosa Le reveló una flor llamada rosaY el curioso color del colorado. Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales Alegrará en perdidos arrabales Las negras uvas de una parra en ciertoPatio que ya no existe. La mojadaTarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada, De mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto. La lluvia – Jorge Luís Borges

Above is one of my favourite Borges poem called La Lluvia (The Rain). My friend George McWhirter the Belfast- born novelist and poet (the first Vancouver Poet Laureate) translates into English the poetry of Mexican poet Homero Aridjis. He smiled when I showed him this poem. He told me that the line:

 

Crocosmia 'Lucifer' 30 July 2026

Un flor llamada rosa y el curioso color del colorado. Borges has here an almost alliteration with curioso, color, colorado cannot be translated..

In Spanish both rojo and colorado are red. In addition, just like in English, you colour something, you do the same with the verb colorear.

All the above comes to mind frequently when I gaze on one of my favourite roses, Rosa ‘Emily Carr’.

A few days ago I was visiting with a photographer friend Storme Morrison who was dog sitting in a house with a splendid garden. It had many Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ and because of my age I could not remember its previous name which to my ear is lovely – monbretia.

I will add my scan of my Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ to this blog because of its redness.

An I cannot leave this blog without showing how lovely images show on my new 28 inch wide Acer monitor and that 11 blogs from now I will have reached 7000 since I started in January 2006.

My 120-year-old Chickering baby grand

Leslie Dala plays the Goldberg Variations  for my Birthday

Ever since I can remember there has been a piano in my life. My mother was a concert pianist. In Buenos Aires in the 40s and 50s we were too poor to have a piano in our Coghlan home. We would visit my grandmother who had a piano in her downtown apartment home. Sometimes my mother’s brother Tony and his sister Dolly would be there. My mother would accompany my grandmother and my Uncle Tony who sang and Aunt Dolly played a violin. It was then that I first heard my mother play Beethoven’s Monlight Sonata.

When we moved to Mexico by 1969 we had an upright Böesendorfer piano in our Arboledas home that my mother played. One day Rosemary told us that we could not pay the rent. My mother said we should sell the piano. She and I cried when the mover’s took the piano away.

By then my mother had advanced Menniere’s Disease. She had a constant ringing in her ears and suffered terrible vertigo. She would still play her piano in frustration telling me she had to imagine what the sound was.

In Vancouver we did not have a piano until 1991 when our neighbour from across the street who was an elderly woman told us that she and her husband were moving and would we want her piano, a 120 year-old Chickering baby grand her grandmother had given to her. The piano crossed the street for $500. It is now in my Kitsilano home.

No, I cannot play the piano but I often use it for photographs.

28 July 2026

My mother was a proto feminist. As a little boy I once complained that she had broken the yolk of the fried eggs she served me. She told me, “Alex if you don’t like the way I fry eggs you learn to make them.” And this I did. My mother taught me to be self-sufficient. Unknowingly  she prepared me for my next feminist who was the woman I first saw from the back on a Mexico City street on December 15, 1967. From that point on and until she died on 9 December 2020 she made all our decisions except one. I will elaborate on that a tad later.

In 1975 she told me that she, our two daughters and I were moving to Vancouver and that we would make that trip in our VW Beetle.

In 1986 she informed me that we were going to move to a lovely house in Kerrisdale that had a large corner garden. The mortgage was $3500 per month. She gave me my domingo which translates to “she gave me a weekly allowance”

Nine years ago I made my first (and perhaps only) important decision. I told Rosemary we could not afford to repair our house roof or fix the leaky bathrooms. Against her will we bought the little duplex in Kitsilano.

We sold our house for a very large sum of money and helped our two daughters to buy their properties. I now do not need to worry about money. In spite of the fact that I made the decision to sell it , it was Rosemary’s and my purchase of the Kerrisdale home that got me to where I am now.

As I read about what is going on in this world I thank Rosemary for having brought us to this Canada that is a stable country in a world that is unstable.

Every day, weather permitting, I go on my bike to Jericho Beach. Almost every day I take a photograph of Vancouver from the same spot in a park on Point Grey Road. I use my Fuji X-E3 digital camera. The view represents to me the stability of my home.

It was on August 15 that Rosemary told me, “Alex you cannot keep bribing the airport security authorities in Buenos Aires and Mexico City to not X-ray your film. You need to buy a digital camera today.” This I did at Leo’s where Jeff Gin recommended a Fuji X-E1. Just in case I have always have had two of everything related to my photographic equipment. I also have a Fuji X-E3. Both cameras have opened up a whole new world even though I take pictures with my film cameras, too.

This 83 year-old man became a very good photographer in Vancouver (to the extent that, yes, we had enough money for that down payment of that Kerrisdale home) thanks to the backing and support of my Rosemary.

And, like my mother she was a feminist. I had to do the cooking and she refused to hem my jeans and sew my buttons.

But I have to clear the air a bit. When I bought her a sewing machine I was the man in charge of adjusting the complicated tension. And I was not too bad at using it.

Until I meet up with my oblivion I will keep saying,”Rosemary, gratias”.

Rosemary 1969 with Bougainvillea glabra - 27 July 2026

Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory

This lovely bougaunvillea started to bloom yesterday on my bedroom table by the window. It was Rosemary’s favourite. Somehow it has survived in the warmth of my bedroom. It is impossible for me to look at it every day when I am in or on my bed without thinking of a Rosemary that was. And yet her plant persists to remind me of my loss after a 52 year marriage.

Rosemary in Buenos Aires 23 March 2027

At my age of almost 84 I sometimes think that my forgetting names or getting into my car and not knowing where I am going, are signs of impending dementia. But my persistent memory plays some strange tricks. I can see the photograph of an actor or actress from that other century and the name comes instantly into my grasp. Possibly because of my dyslexia I had to look up the spelling of bougainvillea

Many of these memories are what Julian Barnes in his 2026 January book Departure(s) [does not explain why he has that s in brackets] Involuntary Autobiographical Memory or IAM. I wrote about the book here: Julian Barnes - Death and the Lemon Table

I love that variation of the word to remember in Spanish that Jorge Luís Borges often used in his poems and essays - rememorar. It sort of means, in a lovely poetic sound - to remember again.

Bronwen - June 2&3 2013 - Pentax MX - 20mm f-4 M lens

Malibu Noir Revisited

My life with cars began - in Veracruz, Mexico in 1967. My mother told me I had to learn to drive a car. I received my first driver’s licence then so I was allowed to drive my mother’s Volkswagen Beatle. By the time I married my Rosemary on June 8 1968 my mother facilitated me with money to buy my own Beatle. We drove in that Beatle to Vancouver in 1975. During a snowstorm on Rupert Street I totalled it but we survived without injury. We then had a VW Rabbit, and a Honda Civic. My Rosemary said we had to then buy a good car (not like my two terrible Fiat X-19s which I drove like the macho I thought I was.) so we had a very large Audi with a 5-cylinder engine. Then we leased a smaller one and I bought a used Maserati Biturbo (the worst car of my life. When we could no longer afford leasing a smaller Audi (the expenses for repairing that Maserati were onerous) I told rosemary we had to buy a used car. She became preoccupied when I chose a used 6-cylinder Chevrolet Malibu, a car so good we drove with our two daughters to the south Texas ranch of my St. Edward’s High School fellow student called Michael East.

At that school a classmate who was a day student, and thus could have a car,                                    took pity on me. I did not know how to dance so I had no girlfriends. He arranged with his girlfriend and he came over with another girl and that was how I found out about sexual preliminaries in the back seat of Chevrolet Corvair. Perhaps it was that experience that led me to photograph (last count 5) women women in my cars.

When we had the Malibu we lived in a splendid corner house in Kerrisdale. It had a very large garden. Rosemary taught me to garden and to learn Greek and Latin botanical nomenclature. I was teaching a photography school called Focal Point. My class was called “The Contemporary Portrait Nude. In one of my sessions I had a fine male model called Michael. One day he recommended the school hire Bronwen. For many years I can attest that she posed for me and she inspired me to take some of the best photographs of my life.

Now with my newish 28inch-wide Acer monitor I have been looking at all those files from my past. I tell everybody I know that a photographer is as good as his/her last photographs. I still take photographs with film and digital and some of the photographs that I took of a lovely woman last week are very good.

But Bronwen was special and she inspired me to try all kinds of avant-garde techniques. In the last few days I have been looking at her file and I have made some of the photographs a bit darker or I removed specks of dust. It was then I that I knew I had an idea for this blog.

With a sneer in my face I tell my Vancouver friends that there is a type of photography in Vancouver that is much in vogue as an art form. There are photographers who with this technique are represented by very good galleries. The premise of this art form is that if you photograph a fire hydrant it means nothing. But if you photograph 100 of them then you have your show. The same applies to taking pictures of crowds. I cannot understand this. After seing 10 of these I would become bored.

In Bronwen’s file I have many photographs of her inside my Chevrolet Malibu inside our Kerrisdale garage. I used two cameras, an Asahi Pentax MX, and a Nikon FM-2. With the Pentax I shot Kodak Tri-X. The Nikon was loaded with Fuji 800ISO colour negative film. I also shot some Polaroids with my medium format Mamiya RB-67. From my records I see we had two sessions.

What is most important for me to point out here is that I discovered the when I was sitting in the driver’s seat and Bronwen was on the passenger seat my 20mm Pentax wide angle M-Lens was so rectilinearly  corrected that the first picture you see here you would never suspect that it was taken with an extreme wide angle.

Since as an art photographer ( believe I am one) I am ignored in this city (my grandmother often quoted to me St. Luke – No one is a profit in his own land) this blog will satisfy me as I believe that Bronwen is above photograph of crowds and fire hydrants.

 Should I now photograph 100 lovely Vancouver manhole covers?

No.

I must add that the Malibu was a car my Rosemary loved. When it finally blew a gasket, she, our eldest daughter and I went to Dueck’s on Marine. My Rosemary told me not to sit with them. They dealt with a woman salesperson who asked if they wanted this or that. They said “yes’ to everything. Our and now my 2017 Chevrolet Cruze (assembled in Mexico) is the best car I have ever owned. It even has a heated steering wheel which matches that other fabulous innovation of my Kitsilano home, a heated toilet seat.

Hosta 'Halcyon' 24 July 2026

halcyon(adj.)

"calm, quiet, peaceful," 1540s, in halcyon dayes (translating Latin alcyonei dies, Greek alkyonides hemerai), 14 days of calm weather at the winter solstice, when a mythical bird (also identified with the kingfisher) was said to breed in a nest floating on calm seas. The name of this fabulous bird is attested in Middle English as alcioun (late 14c.).

The name is from Latin halcyon, alcyon, from Greek halkyon, variant (perhaps a misspelling) of alkyon "kingfisher," a word of unknown origin.

The explanation that this is from hals "sea; salt" (see halo-) + kyon "conceiving," present participle of kyein "to conceive," literally "to swell" (see cumulus) probably is ancient folk-etymology to explain a loan-word from a non-Indo-European language. Identified in mythology with Halcyone, daughter of Aeolus, who when widowed threw herself into the sea and became a kingfisher.

The myth of the Halcyon days is unexplained. The above statements have no zoological significance ; the Kingfisher neither breeds at four months old, nor lays five eggs (but rather six or seven), nor nests in the winter season, nor on the sea. I conjecture that the story originally referred to some astronomical phenomenon, probably in connexion with the Pleiades, of which constellation Alcyone is the principal star. [D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, "A Glossary of Greek Birds," 1895] Etymology on Line.

When people ask me what my favourite rose is I usually answer, “It depends on the week.” When the question is about my hostas it is always Hosta ‘Halcyon’. It is an elegant plant with bluish leaves and in July it has beautiful flowers. My blog about the origin of this hosta is this one:

Halcyon the Essence of Blueness

Hostas do not love shade. The proper nomenclature for them is “shade tolerant’. Mine gets mostly shade and it remains blue past August.

Because the expression “halcyon days” is a well-known one for me it is about my days with my Rosemary in our very large corner garden in Kerrisdale. They were definitely the good old days as our granddaughters visited us and I photographed them in our garden.

In my garden there is another comparable plant to my Halcyon and my other hostas. This is my now 5 year old (Rosemary never got to see it) Rosa ‘Emily Carr’. Besides being a lovely red rose it shares with my hostas to do well in all the Canadian provinces down to a Zone 3.

I am a gardener thanks to Rosemary’s prodding. But I can assert that anybody, no matter the colour of their thumb, can grow hostas.

 The above scan is of a Halcyon cultivar for which I have lost the name tag