Camellia sasanqua 'Yuletide'

A Yuletide Memory Postponed
 

Time confuses me as I thought that I had purchased a Camellia sasanqua ‘Yuletide’ just in the last four years. That could not be the case as Rosemary died on Dec 9 2020 and for at least three years before she would nag me in about the second week of December to go and look for this camellia that blooms near Christmas. It seemed that the camellia was not all that hardy and it would die.

This year my camellia survived from last year but (a big but) it did not bloom until a few days ago. Why would this be? My suspicion is that those camellias from the past were grown in a greenhouse so they were forced to bloom earlier.

Whichever I look at this I can only smile when I enter or leave my house as my camellia is on a stone block outside. It has only two blooms. I cut them both for this blog without having second thoughts.

This camellia, like all the plants in my garden, have (flowers or not) the lovely face of my Rosemary.

Top - Helleborus 'Honeymoon Blue' & Helleborus x niger 'Honeyhill Joy' 22 February 2026

The date of the scan here is today when I wrote this blog. I am filling holes as I have been doing a lot of bed rotting with Niño and Niña. I have been staring at the ceiling and doing a lot of thinking.  As Captain Beefheart said in his Ashtray Hearts - 'He's had too much to think."

Captain Beefheart - Too Much to Think

It is impossible for me to look at the now flowering hellebores without thinking that if Rosemary were alive she would look at them and smile. My Rosemary kept her emotions mostly to herself. Even though she must have laughed I don’t have a memory of her doing it.

Because of the cold rainy weather these weeks I keep postponing the inevitable which is to clean up my garden and prune my roses. The pots with my hostas have dead leaves that I have to remove. On a string of sunny days this can be a pleasant task. I do use a short ladder and my daughter Hilary says she wants to be present when I am on it. I try to be careful and I like to be independent but I just might take up her offer.

One of the spring activities that Rosemary and I indulged in was to go to nurseries to see what new plants were being offered. Now I am more likely to keep just what  have and when something dies to just remove the plant. My garden is what I call a shoulder to shoulder garden where you do not see dirt. My hostas grow to be big so that dirt underneath does not show.

Just like I don’t plant to go to the American Hosta Society Convention this year (partly  because I want to avoid going to the US ) I do believe that I might even stop paying my dues and not be a member of the society.

Is increasing withdrawal an indication of my age? I believe it is.

 Julian Barnes - Death and the Lemon Table

The Julian Barnes book Departures(s) is definitely not a novel even though it is called that. I am reading it slowly as there is so much information that for me is startling which at the same time I can understand.

Barnes mentions something he calls IAM which stands for Involuntary Autobiographical Memory. Some people have an extreme version of this and become stifled in their life to continue on.

While I do not remember (even if I try) what it was like when I was born I remember st stuff like being 7 or 8 and my mother was combing me. She said, “This hair over your forehead makes you look like Hitler.” I believe I asked him who he was but I do not remember her answer.

This IAM and an extreme version called HSAM or highly superior autobiographical memory, keeps appearing in my thoughts all the time. There is one in particular that I have written about before. I was six and I went into a cabinet to help myself with more candy corn that my mother had hidden there. When I opened the cabinet there was a mirror. I stared into it and thought, “This is me.” Since then it has become almost impossible for me to look into a mirror and not be back to when I was six. I think immediately of Borges who said that every first time is followed by that first time, over and over. And famously he asked, “Is this the last time this mirror will reflect my face?”

I had two good friends from my four years at the Catholic boarding school, St.Edward’s High School, in the late 50s. One of them, Howard Houston taught my older granddaughter when she was 8 to fish. The other friend, Lee Lytton my wife and two granddaughters met in his birthplace in Sarita, Texas. He was most gracious and invited us to a nice restaurant by a river.

Why are these two friends in my thoughts? These thoughts are definitely not voluntary.

I will have to keep on with the Barnes book to see if he has more revelations on the subject.

When I look at a book in a bookstore I like to read the first paragraph (and sometimes the last). I wrote about that here. In Departure(s) Barnes has this first paragraph – The other day I discovered and alarming possibility. No, worse: an alarming fact.

First Paragraphs and Autobiographical Novels 

But even more startling is that on the previous page he has the title for the first chapter – The Great I Am.

I believe that this book is the best book to read if you are reaching that age when oblivion is statistically an immediate possibility.

The photograph of Rosemary illustrating this blog I took in 1969 a year after we had been married in Mexico City. It is in front of my bed on the opposite wall where she stares at me and I stare back. I was there in 1969 with my camera in hand. I cannot stop thinking that. It is my AIM working and like Borges would have said, I look at her portrait which I just took.

Galanthus - 15 February 2026

Galanthus - February 6, 2022

To a Snowdrop – William Wordsworth

Lone Flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they

But hardier far, once more I see thee bend

Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,

Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,

Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay

The rising sun, and on the plains descend;

Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend

Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May

Shall soon behold this border thickly set

With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing

On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;

Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,

Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,

And pensive monitor of fleeting years!

When I started my blogging in 2006 I had no idea that many of my blogs would combine poetry with my photographs. Through the years I have amassed over 150 blogs where I mate my images with Emily Dickinson. I have blogs that feature Jorge Luís Borges, William Carlos Williams, Julio Cortázar, Alfonsina Storni and many more. This blog will be the first one where I combine Rosemary’s galanthus with William Wordsworth. One of the results of all this is that because I have a decent memory I know quite a few poems about many subjects.

The snowdrops in my Kitsilano garden were all put there by Rosemary. She did everything possible to have something flowering in any month of the years. Right now, besides her snowdrops, there are five helleborus. I wrote about them here.

Rosemary's Hellebores 

The hellebores remind me of Rosemary because they are sturdy and bulletproof just like she was. But because she was dainty, gentle, small and feminine the snowdrops are my Rosemary.

Alex and Pancho - Ektachrome - Curtis Daily

Rosa 'Betsy Sinclair'

La Santa Muerte 

The Horror of Death - the Philosopher Opines 

A few days ago I read a terrific review of Julian Barnes’s latest and not quite novel. It is called Departures(s). Barnes says this will be his 15^th and last book. While he is a tad younger than I am he has Parkinson’s and a cancer that is not quite terminal.

I know that while I have promised myself not to buy more books, I know I will have to buy and read it.

In other blogs I have written about my favourite Barnes novel Nothing to Be Afraid Of. Because I lived in Mexico for many years I don’t avoid thinking about death as so many do in our Anglo USA and Canada. I have taken photographs of a Mexican friend where both of us explored the patron saint of Mexican drug traffickers called La Santa Muerte.

As a little boy of 8 in Buenos Aires my mother took me (definitely with a purpose) to the open casket funeral of a neighbour. He was a teenage son who had run into a train in his motor scooter. I remember seeing his bandaged face. A few weeks later a neighbour across the street won the lottery. For about a year I thought that only neighbours died or won the lottery.  A year later my mother went to the Philippine Embassy on Caller Florida which was in the same building as the American Embassy. Next to it was the Lincoln Library that had a novel surprise for Argentines. If you became a member you could borrow and take a book home. I looked a book or magazine called American Heritage. In it I saw bodies of dead soldiers (mostly Confederate) taken by Timothy O’Sullivan during the American Civil War. It was then that I really had my first glimpse of the inevitability of death. I marveled how those dead soldiers looked no different from the men walking outside on Calle Florida.

My next exposure to death happened in 1966. My uncle (a pleasant fake one) Leo Mahdjubian called me at my office at the Argentine Navy and said, “Alexander your father kicked the bucket yesterday. He was taken to the hospital by a police sergeant so you will have to go to the police station to sign some documents.” I was called by that sergeant who told me he had been a friend of my father and that he knew that he had been working hard at a laundry to save money so he could bribe an army general so that I could be sent back to my mother’s in Veracruz. He further told me that he had emptied my father’s pockets as they would have been emptied at the hospital. With the money that my father had been saving, this penniless conscript paid a cheap funeral for his father.

Rosemary and I were there at my mother’s bed in 1972 when she was dying. I was able to watch and hear her breath in and then die. We could not find a local doctor to sign a death certificate. This was done by a vet who said, “Tu mamá está muertita.”

But my most devastating witness to death happened 6 minutes before Rosemary died in bed on December 9, 2020. She asked, “Am I dying?”

How does one answer? I did not.

Somehow the little yellow rose in this blog brings me a pleasant memory of Rosemary even though I purchased the rose after she died.

Rosa 'Betsy Sinclair'

 I had already on my breast a little sign that read: - Closed for demolition-.

And here you have me painting the walls, opening the windows, decorating

the table with a yellow flower, with which  autumn pays for its charms.

Mexican poet Carlos Pellicer 

A few months before my Rosemary died on 9 December 2020, my cardiologist called me. He noticed that I had applied for a right knee replacement. He told me, “Alex, you must cancel this as you will have to take care of Rosemary.” This I did and until now I have not had any problems with that knee. My rheumatologist told me that cycling was good exercise to keep my knees in shape.

A couple of days ago I went cycling for an hour. When I returned my right knee had that familiar pain of 5 years ago. I have to be careful going up and down the stairs to my room as I tend to lose my balance.

This has all resulted on my thinking about my age. I look at Niño, who while being in remission from his lymphatic cancer of the intestines, looks at me sometimes with a faraway look. He refuses to walk around the block with me on sunny days. I have written before how when he stares at me I think that he is telling me, “Alex, don’t die before Niña and me. Who would take care of us?”

At my age I have four Vancouver friends my age, or older, who have intact marbles. The rest of those my age or over have all since died. I do have a cousin in Buenos Aires who is 82.

This isolation of living alone with Niño and Niña is now really hitting home and can now see that my immediate future is about to end.