Rosa 'Baron Girod de L'Ain' & Rosa 'Gabriel Oak' 23 June 2026

 

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odor which doth in it live.

The canker blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumèd tincture of the roses,

Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly

When summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses;

But, for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwooed and unrespected fade,

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made.

 And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

 When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.

William Shakespeare – Sonnet 54

It is amazing to me how some roses can be over-the-top flashy and others subtle. One of the roses, here The Baron, has this barely noticeable white edge at the end of the petals. The other Gabriel Oak is awfully flashy.

Whenever I see a red rose I remember in Spanish  the  Gorge Luis Borges La lluvia. I must note here than in Spanish the title of books and poems will begin in a capital letter but then no more. In La lluvia (The Rain) he writes “la rosa, el curioso color del colorado.” It is almost a complete alliteration because in Spanish we have colorado as a synonym for rojo.

Thanks to my Rosemary, who gently forced me to attend a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society in 1991 and my beginning to scan roses in 2001, I had to find an excuse to put the scans in my blogs. This I did by writing of their connection to literature. I have in all those years been exposed to many a poem that resides in my memory.

 And of course every rose I look at immediately brings my memory of that beautiful rose that was my Rosamaría.                                                            

My parents

In this vacuous 21st century that I call The Age of the Emoji, it is impossible to not notice that famous people die every day so we have put up their pictures in social media and just comment how wonderful they were. Then there is the wishing a happy birthday to people who are long dead.

Today is father’s day and nobody seems to acknowledge that it is also grandfather’s day. Pictures of fathers are placed in social media with perhaps the one comment on how they are missed.

My awareness of stuff related to my father began when I was a little boy in Buenos Aires and my mother would tell me, “Alex, you will never understand because you will never be a mother”. She died in 1972 and it was only after that I figured out I should have told her, “Mother you will never understand because you will never be a father.”

Few today will write what it is like to be a father. For me today I have to remember my Rosemary as she is the person who made me a father as she had our two daughters Alexandra and Hilary.

We left Mexico City in 1975 for Vancouver because Rosemary said that as things were at the time in Mexico it was not a good place for our children. Until I had a good income as a photographer in Vancouver by 1977/78 Rosemary used whatever money we had to take care of our daughters.

She told me we were going to live in Burnaby so that I could go to Vancouver to find work but (very important) we would be close enough to Coquitlam so Ale and Hilary could learn French. One day years later when Ale said, “Me and some guys…” Rosemary decided that Ale had to be put in a private school which ended up being York House. With some prodding on her part both our daughters went to university. Ale attended UBC and Hilary went to Simon Fraser.

Once we were grandparents Rosemary and I made sure our granddaughters had all the opportunities to improve their lives. We paid for dance, swimming and piano lessons. We took our granddaughters to Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay. We took them to the Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library, at first in the children’s department. We did our best to inculcate them into reading.

I am afraid now that in this century when grandfather’s day is not acknowledged that as one I am now simply an old man who is obsolete, redundant, retired and inconsequential.

And yes today I remember my father George fondly and I remember all that he did to make me a better person. Best of all I thank him for inheriting me his ability to be a journalist. I write my blog and this one is blog 6942. He would be proud.

I must add that besides having a father I had a few others. These were the Brothers and Fathers of Holy Cross who gave me an outstanding education in my four years at St. Edward's High School in Austin, Texas.

My Bother Fathers Remembered

I will acknowledge that mentors can be both women and men. But few might not know who the original mentor was. When Ulises  went to fight in troy he hired a mentor calle Mentor to teach his son Telemachus.

Christopher Dafoe

Send-offs to old friends can be melancholic. Such is the case for a going away (to Winnipeg) event at the Sylvia Hotel today from 5 to 8 for Christopher Dafoe.

Christopher and I collaborated (me with photographs, he with interviews) of famous people for the Globe and Mail in Vancouver. Of all the many writers I ever worked with this man could sit in front of someone like film director Krzysztof Kieślowski and not say anything. The folks facing him would look at his calm face and simply open up with all sorts of intimate details.

Christopher was gracious enough to allow me to be present at these interviews, usually in Vancouver hotels so that I could get my large camera and lights ready and to observe the mannerisms of the person who would face my camera.

I met Christopher many years before when he worked for CITR Radio. I may be one of the few persons that remembers that he was a DJ at the stripper heaven Drake Hotel. He taught the ecdysiasts to appreciate local punk and pop bands. I saw some of my favourites like Cheri dance to Maurice and the Clichés.

When Christopher was asked by the Globe to move to Toronto he declined. He entered the University of British Columbia and became a highfalutin lawyer.

I will always be grateful to Chris as he has been the only person who appreciated my rose scans and bought one (yes!) from me.

I wish Christopher the best in his native city of Winnipeg.

An added humorous note. The picture you see here I made into a place mat. I have no idea if Christopher kept it.

Top - Rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' & Rosa 'Fantin Latour' 18 June 2026

The few who might read my blogs may be thinking, “When is this idiot going to stop scanning his roses and show us some of his erotic portraits of women?”

The fact is that at this time of the year my roses are in bloom and whenever I look at them I am almost sure they tell me, “Scan me now.”

I have written a few times about Julian Barnes’s latest book Departures(s) in which he does not explain why that s in in brackets. He writes about IAm or  Invonluntary Autobiographical Memory. When I looked at the smallish pink rose in the scan here, Rosa ‘Fantin Latour’ I was hit by the memory of where this rose was planted (by the fence on 45thAve) in our Kerrisdale home. Yes, the rose in my Kits garden may at least be 18 years old.

Julian Barnes & the Lemon Table

I wrote about the artist Latour in this blog (link below) and I connected him to a portrait I took of a wonderful woman called Caitlin Legault.

Henri Fantin Latour

The other rose, a much larger one, was one of Rosemary’s favourites as its name, ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ connects the rose to our older daughter (58) Alexandra.

Without me being able to stop the memory (IAM) I am barraged by remembrances that connect my roses to people or incidents of my past life.

More often these roses barrage me with thoughts of my Rosemary who first gently forced me to go to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society in 1991.

Rosemary said I had too many pink roses, but she did love the Princess.

And yes putting here scans of my roses is about as satisfying as my erotic photographs of women.

Many of my peer photographers go to the Gulf Islands and retire. In Spanish to retire it to jubilar. The root is júbilo which translates to an enthusiastic  jubilation.

In that other century I hated going to photograph Canadian Pacific Limited retirements. I would complain to Rosemary who would look at me with “we need the money” eyes. These men would be American-style roasted. One was given a rocking chair, another a job jar to put in the kitchen so his wife would write little notes on tasks he was obliged to do.

At my age of 83 the concept of retirement from my photography, scanning and writing these blogs is anathema.

Ever since my Argentine mentor artist  Juan Manuel Sácnchez pointed out and convinced me that there was an artist in me, the idea of quitting and watching TV, is something I will not consider.

I may be lucky in that my vision is very good so I can sit in front of monitor and fix the dust spots of my plant scans.

Here are three that I believe are out of the ordinary (cutting edge perhaps?).

In one of them, I pointed my Mamiya RB-67 at Courtenay who was on the opposite wall of my studio. In front of the Mamiya, I had my iPhone3G in a bracket on a tripod. I then focused and took a picture with my Fuji X-E1 of  what I could see looking down on the Mamiya viewfinder.

I define this century as the photographer that I am – Access Denied.

In that long gone20th I had access to important and famous people. Les Wiseman who wrote a column In One Ear for Vancouver Magazine soon found out that my photographs of rock stars with microphones in front of their mouths looked like everybody else. We had pull so we did interviews and photographs back stage or in hotels.

The two pictures I am using today to illustrate this blog I took at our Vancouver City Morgue in March 1994. Not only was I given access but I asked the caretakers to hose the floor as I wanted it to shine. I took my pictures with two cameras. For the panoramic with my swivel lens Widelux I used extremely fast Kodak 3200 ISO T-Max Film. For the other I loaded my Mamiya RB-67 with the sharpest film ever made, Kodak Technical Pan that had a small ISO of 25.

I doubt that I would obtain access now as I would not be able to represent any magazine or newspaper.