Tuesday, October 14, 2008


Every time we drive to Lillooet and back it is impossible to not notice the hundreds of thousands of pine trees that are dead or dying (the pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae) between Lillooet and Lytton. What makes the trees that more obvious is their beautiful bark made up of rough, rich reddish brown plates with wide dark brown or black grooves. This last Sunday I decided to stop and photograph Rebecca with my Noblex panoramic camera which shoots a 7 inch long negative. It is most unfortunate that this blog will not show pictures that are longer than 5 inches but if you click on the image it will get larger.

Before we left we pulled a bunch of needles so we could indentify the pine with our books at home. We called our daughter Ale in Lillooet that evening and she told us the pines were Pinus contorta (Lodge Pine and Lodgepole Pine). She could not confirm it to us as she had never stopped to check on the needles but this is what the city sages had told her.



My wife Rosemary knew differently. Both of us had met the gentle and erudite Gerald Bane Straley (he died in 1997) who was the Research Scientist and Curator of Collections at the UBC Botanical Garden. I had even taken a course on propagation with him and found his enthusiasm catching.

Rosemary had been taught by Straley that the only definitive way of identifying a pine tree was to count how many needles grew from one bunch. A Pinus contorta has only two needles per bunch and the pines between Lillooet and Lytton had three. Our books showed the telltale bark but said nothing of the needles.

But then I remembered Straley's book. It is one of the most useful books in our botanical book collection (a splendid thing to say in an age of looking up stuff on Google). It is called Trees of Vancouver - A Guide to the Common and Unusual Trees of the City. On the conifer section he confirmed (the three needles) what Rosemary has suspected. Our beautiful dying pines were and are Pinus ponderosa.

This book, which should still be in print is one of the finest books to be had. The diagram and explanation of every tree in the Shaughnessy Crescent is worth the price of the book. Best of all every varity of tree in our city is given a location within Vancouver where one can find a good specimen.



When I photographed Dr. Straley at the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre of Plant Research (that's the new name of the garden) I asked him what was his favourite plant at the time. It was Kirengeshoma koreana.

Thanks to Straley's little book we know all about the Pinus ponderosa but we will have to stop again and check out another detail we did not know about. You see he says:



There is a definite fragrance of vanilla when the cracks of the bark are smelled...the name comes from ponderous, that is, having great weight or mass, referring to the size of the trees.



If you cannot buy the book new used copies can be found on the web. And for info on all things botanical, one of the best (some say the best) web pages in the world is UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research

Monday, October 13, 2008


A constant theme here has been my harping on the wonders and benefits of routine. In particular it is an association of routine with custom and tradition. My wife Rosemary is a creature of routine as are both my granddaughters Rebecca and Lauren. It is never more evident than when we go to visit Ale in Lillooet. The girls expect my home made pizza in the car by the time we get to Chilliwack on our way North. They expect to be exposed to new music on the CD player yet Rebecca wants some of the oldies such as Oscar Peterson playing the Work Song.

Of late I have been thwarted by oposing routines to my peril. When I print a b+w negative in my darkroom the emulsion (the matte side of the negative) is always facing down. When I scan that same negative the emulsion has to be facing up. Over the weekend I took some photos of Leo the horse to his owner Lloyd McNary. It was too late to re print them when I noticed I had printed them backwards. Luckily McNary did not notice.



Routine in a darkroom is important. When the lights are out I instinctively know where everything is and when I go to grab this or that I find it. The opposite of this routine is similar to working on someone else's computer and navigating with an alien mouse!

Sometime around 1965 I was visiting my first cousin Inesita O'Reilly Kuker in her home in San Isidro and she instructed me to buy her some sliced ham at the local almacén. I asked the man behind the counter for 350 gramos de jamon cocido (cooked ham). At that point the man began to shout at me, "I have mortadella, prosciutto, many varieties of cheese and you dare to ask me for sliced cooked ham?" He shouted and almost went beserk. I turned tail. My guess is that he was finally done in by customers' routine.



I have a fondness for listening to live performances of Vivaldi's Gloria and part of my routine is to bring along a stop watch to record the variation in length. It would seem that my love for routine sometimes involves a variation of it.

Going to visit Ale is all routine. That routine was broken by bringing The Flight of the Red Balloon. This is an art film that is as slow as watching red paint dry. An 8 minute long one camera take may delight a film aficionado but it did not delight anybody even though I had fallen for the review of the film in the NY Times which was glowing.

Another routine, the taking of a photograph in the same place, but months or years later brought tears to Rebecca's eyes who flatly refused to pose by Lloyd McNary's gate. Ale stressed the idea that I was trying to record how time changes things and people so Rebecca reluctantly posed with Sunny. The little girl that faced my camera in the spring seems to be an entirely different one that posed for me on Saturday.

Another routine that was modified to the better was that I was less critical with Ale on her rustic living and I did my best to praise the relief we feel in spending a couple of days "en el campo" as Argentines say.



But I think that what is best about routine is the realization and sadness of knowing that all routines must end. It is part of the pleasure to savour them as if each time were their last.

Sunday, October 12, 2008


A nicely printed photograph of actress Liv Ullmann leans against the wall in my Robson Street studio. It has been there for at least 10 years. Fewer and fewer people who come to my studio notice her haunting face and fewer and fewer ever ask me who she is. When they do I like to throw the rather useless facts about her that she is not the most famous Swedish actress because she is known as a Norwegian even though she was born in Tokyo in 1938.

My grandmother never suffered fools and when someone uttered a folly in her presence she would tell me later, "La ignorancia es atrevida." Her Spanish origin "Ignorance is daring." is a much more damning version of "ignorance is bliss". When people really did make fools of themselves she brought up an expression which showed the Darwinian conflict the Spaniards had with Darwin in late 19th century Spain. "Asomó el rabo," she would say. It was equivalent to, "he showed his monkey tail".

I remember two particular daring and completely stupid utterances of mine that make me blush in shame every time I think about them. Sometime around 1964 I had a cultured friend with whom I went to concerts of all kinds. He was particularly keen on Ella Fitzgerald. One day he asked me, "Have you heard Carmina Burana?" He was extremely kind to me when I answered, "No, who's she?"

At an American high school in Mexico City where I taught around 1969 I had some interesting teen age students who one day asked me, "Mr Hayward, have you heard any Alice Cooper?" They all roared when I asked, "No, who's she?"

As a little boy in Buenos Aires we were all read in class the novel Corazón by Edmundo de Amicis. Until quite recently there was nothing about this Italian author in libraries or on the web. In most cases he has been forgotten as was the author (I have no idea who it was) of a biography in Spanish of Franz Schubert that our fifth grade teacher used to read to us every day.

For me, memory is much like a red carpet that is being rolled out at the same time that its opposite end is being rolled up. As we gain more facts our brains stores memories of our past into cubbyholes that sometimes are just about impossible to access later. Unlike computers we cannot buy more RAM. I think that this unrolling and unrolling happens with history, literature, music and just about everything else. John Gunther's Inside books were common knowledge and popular when I was a teenager. He has faded even more than my mother's favourite (and mine) spy novelist Eric Ambler. All those films based on Jane Austen or with Jane Austen as a protagonist have done nothing to revive much interest in one of her remarkable earlier contemporaries, Fanny Burney (below,left) who inspired Austen to write.



I have a student in a photography class, the history of photography, whose last name is Kertész. I found it odd that my student had never heard of the famous Hungarian photographer, André Kertész who was one of the early founders of photojournalism. I have another student, very tall with a profile that rivals Barbra Streisand. On the day that I pointed out her resemblance she had a tall hairdo much like Streisand's in Funny Girl. My student has no knowledge of Streisand. It does make my class easier to teach. Much of what I tell them is absolutely new.

A few years back (8, perhaps) I was driving my car while listening to a wonderful solo piano on CBC radio. I stopped and waited to find out what it was. It was Beethoven's Bagatelle for piano in A minor ('Für Elise'), WoO 59. I had to call someone to tell them of my experience. I dialed my friend and VSO pianist Linda Lee Thomas. Her husband Jon Washburn, the conductor of the Vancouver Chamber Choir answered. I unloaded my wonder on him. His remark is one I will never forget because of the sadness in his voice, "Oh, Alex, to hear something for the first time. I am so jealous."

I propose to be less vitriolic and more patient with my students' spotty knowledge of that I would consider important. Perhaps I can enthuse them to the wonders of Kertesz and even(!) Barbara Streisand. I have softened up thanks to the book that seems to be currently consuming my waking hours, Julian Barnes's nothing to be frightened of.

A few years ago I was at the Birmingham City Art Gallery. In one glassed-in corner, there is a small, intense painting by Petrus Christus, of Christ displaying his wounds: with outstreched forefinger and thumb he indicates where the spear went in - even invites us to measure the gash. His crown of thorns has sprouted into a gilt, spun-sugar halo of glory. Two saints, one with a lily and the other with a sword, attend him, drawing back the green velvet drapes of a strangely domestic proscenium.



As I was stepping away from my inspection, I became aware of a track-suited father and small son travelling towards me at a lively art-hating clip. The father, equipped with better trainers and more stamina, held a yard or two's advantage as they turned this corner. The boy glanced into the exhibition case and asked, in a strong Brummy accent, 'Why's that man holding his chest, Dad?' The father without breaking stride, managed a quick look back and an instant answer:'Dunno.'

Saturday, October 11, 2008




Some of my most enjoyable pleasures in coming to Lillooet are the routines of watching a movie the evening we arrive and breakfast the next day. A slight modification to this routine is Rebecca's Nintendo DS. I asked her what the DS meant and it is double screen as the game has two. I have re-baptized the game the DSB and when Rebecca asked me I told her, "It stands for dumb sh.. box." She was not amused. Breakfast of apple strudel, sausages, watermelon, melon and my own very strong tea had to be shared with a Rebecca telling the little dogs of her game to sit, beg and roll over.

Selecting a film at Videomatica is simple. Since I have to please Lauren, Rebecca, Rosemary and Ale my selection has to have a little bit of everything. I have found that the best place to look is in the British film section. We watched Nanny McFhee (2006), Directed by Kirk Jones; written by Emma Thompson and based on the Nurse Matilda books by Christianna Brand. Both Colin Firth and Emma Thompson star in it with a too brief but hilarious performance as an assistant embalmer by Derik Jacobi.

Rosemary and I discussed how this is the sort of film that satisifes everybody because the English, unlike Hollywood, do not dumb down. Rebecca just said, "Colin Firth is a heartthrob." I look forward to tonight's viewing of The Flight Of The Red Balloon. Can any film with Juliette Binoche be anything but luscious?

The picture here I took almost 50 years ago in the thieves' market of La Lagunilla in Mexico City. The man represents to me that blend of magic and reality which has to be the principal ingredient of why we were all glued to the screen last night.

Friday, October 10, 2008


Rosemary is in a tizzy, as always, before we go anywhere. I have been instructed to make the pizza and choose what I want to wear. We are going with the girls, Lauren and Rebecca to visit Ale in Lillooet. The pizza is part of the routine that the girls like. We eat the pizza as soon as we are past Chilliwack on our way to Lillooet via the Fraser Canyon. For the trip I have to select 6 or 7 CDs of music. I mix jazz and classical piano to keep Rebecca's interest in that instrument alive. Today we will be listening to Philip Glass playing Metamorphoses on solo piano, and Philippe Entremont playing Satie's Piano Works. But there will also be some Dave Brubeck and John Lewis playing the piano with Bill Perkins (tenor sax), Jim Hall (guitar), Percy Heath (bass) and Chico Hamilton (drums) in one of my desert island discs 2 Degrees East - 3 Degrees West.

I always feel an excitement of going to the "country" or "the camp" as Anglo Argentines are fond of saying. As a little boy I was often dispatched by my parents to the campo for a few weeks during the summer school holidays in January. I marveled at the exhiliaration I felt when I stood on the Argentine pampa and I rotated my body 360 degrees and not find anything or anybody breaking that sharp horizon line unless it were that natural interruption of that non tree tree that Argentines worship, the Ombú.

This morning I gave it some extra thought and I had this curious feeling that somehow it was familiar but in reverse. I soon found the passage in William Henry Hudson's A Traveller in Little Things. This book of essays on travels throughout Britain were written four years after his autobiographical memoir, Far Away and Long Ago which gives an account of his childhood on the pampa where he was born in 1841. If he had written nothing else, Hudson would be remembered for this poignant memoir. There is a little bit of this memoir feeling in the little story The Two White Houses: A Memory.


It was the great southern road which leads from the city of Buenos Ayres, the Argentine capital, to the vast level cattle-country of the pampas, where I was born and bred. Naturally it was a tremendously exciting adventure to a child's mind to come from these immense open plains, where one lived in rude surrounding with the semi barbarous gauchos for only neighbours, to a great civilised town full of people and of things strange and beautiful to see. And to touch and taste.

Thus it happened that when I, a child, with my brothers and sisters, were taken to visit the town we would become more and more excited as we approached it at the end of a long journey, which usually took us two days, at all we saw - ox-carts and carriages and men on horseback on the wide hot dusty road, and the houses and groves and gardens on either side...




The estancia Hudson, Los 25 Ombues in Quilmes, Province of Buenos Aires where Hudson was born in, near the Chichitas river in Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina would be about 40 minutes away by train today. Quilmes then was certainly not Lillooet today nor does Vancouver today in any way resemble the lazy city of Buenos Aires then. But I still feel that my "journey into the interior" in a modern car with a slice of pizza on my lap is some sort of wonderful trip into the unknown.

I do look forward to it.

Thursday, October 09, 2008



I have written of friendship and the loss of it here but it has been much in my thoughts of late. In that previous blog I quoted Harold Bloom from his book How To Read And Why:

"We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space,time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life."

Last night I read something most similar from Julian Barnes's nothing to be frightened of:
"I look around at my many friendships, and can recognize that some of them are not so much friendships any more as memories of friendship."


Not too many months ago I finally was able to communicate with my cousing Georgito O'Reilly in Buenos Aires using Skype and a webcam. After a few minutes of conversation, Georgito, who has never ever not said what he thinks told me, "Here we are talking and yet we seem to have so little in common to talk about."

I attempted to call a friend in the US with Skype but was stopped by the firewall of an answering machine that accepted no anonymous calls. Skype by its very nature is anoymous when one calls from computer to telephone. So I called up my friend on the regular phone and I was told he hated the phone but I could try his cellular. On another day I didi just that but I was cut off very quickly by, "Alex I am at my mother-in-law's and she hates for me to be on the phone, besides I don't really need to talk to you because I read your blog. I know what you are up to."

Today I spoke with a local friend on the phone and began to tell him of my experience of reading the Julian Barnes book but I was interrupted, "I know all about it, I read it in your blog."

My first cousin, Jorge Wenceslao de Irureta Goyena was my favourite cousin when I was a small boy principally because he was the only one I saw regularly. I lost him for a few years and saw him again when we were both 21. You can see us here (and further down when we were younger playing with his father's U-control airplanes) in a photo taken by simply extending my Pentacon F clunker camera in front with the self-timer in operation. It is in hazy focus but you can see the difference between us. he had inherited the dark good looks of his Argentine mother whose family hailed from the province of Corrientes. At the time of this photograph Wenci and I had a deep disagreement on Piazzolla and tango. According to Wenci Piazzolla was not tango. He was the conservative one while I argued that the tango had to evolve into something new. Somehow my memory does not tell me much as to why we didn't see much of each other.



From his father, Antonio, who lived in North Carolina I found out quite a few years ago that Wenci had gone to meet up with him there. Then there was nothing and my uncle died. There were rumours (most shocking to Wenci's conservative family) that he had married a black woman with children. I did not know if this was true.

With the advent of internet and Googgle I have been trying to tie up the loose strings of my life and I have located just about all the people that have meant something to me. In some cases I caught up with their trail a few months after their death and with others just in time. But the one I simply found nothing on was Wenci.

Many of my friends and relatives did what most do as soon as they get internet. They Google themselves. Many found my blog and found me when I could not find them. Wenci was the holdout. I even managed to find his stepmother in North Carolina who told me that he had gone back to Buenos Aires after having lived in North Carolina for 19 years.

It was a week or two ago that Wenci finally bought a computer and he did the obvious and he found me from a blog this one one about death!

So we are back communicating with email and Skype phone calls. Pictures have been flying back and forth and I wonder when I or he will feel like Georgito O'Reilly that we might just have so little in common?

In the other photo taken about the same time as the one with Wenci (also with a self timer but with the camera leaning on something) I am with my first real sweetheart, Corina. In recent years I hear little from her. She lives in England and has two boys. I sometimes prod her into answering.



While surfing my blog my cousin Diane Hayward found this one. She was amazed as she had known Corina in school. Diane was older but they had gone to the same school. My cousin Elizabeth Blew and Corina had been classmates. Just a few days before finding my blog Diane and Elizabeth had run into Corina at a play. Corina had returned to BA for a few days to arrange the selling of a property. My name had no reason to be mentioned. But it was later. In fact Corina took singing lessons with Diane's mother my Aunt Iris. I guess I am the culprit that in my brief relationship with Corina I never mentioned the names of my cousins.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008


In 1949 Ilived in the Buenos Aires suburb of Coghlan on Calle Melián which was not far from the Pirovano Hospital. Beautiful black-lacquered hearses, drawn by four shiny black stallions with black plumes on their head, frequently passed by, empty, on their way to the hospital morgue. Because our street, like many then, and even now, were paved with large Paris style cobblestones we could always hear the precise clicking of the horse's hooves. We lingered in the hope of spotting the coffin behind the beveled crystal windows.

Not long after I searched our garden plum trees for the appropriate horqueta or "y joint" that I could cut off to make an honda or slingshot. We always used a discarded bicycle inner tube to make the elastic part of the weapon. I then attempted to shoot any unlucky wren silly enough to rest in one of the plum trees. A few did and eventually I had my first kill. I was appalled and almost ashamed when I saw the dead bird on the grass. It was really my first look at death.

I remember connecting with the character that Molly Parker (as a young girl) plays in the 1999 Lynne Stopkewich film Kissed. In it she buries dead animals from her garden with lots of pomp and ceremony in blue Birks boxes. I never shot at a bird again with that slingshot.

Two years later, in 1951, my cousin Jorge Wenceslao de Irureta Goyena spotted a very large toad in an estancia north of Goya in the Province of Corrientes. He began to hit it with a large stone. I tried to stop him but to no avail. A few days later my uncle Tony (Wency's father) took us into the jungle with his .22 rifle. The jungle canopy was a loud green cloud of thousands of parakeets. We stopped and then Uncle Tony began a systematic execution of the birds telling us they were a plague. After 50 or 60 of them plummeted from the upper branches of the trees we went back to the estancia house.

On July 26, 1952 Eva Perón died. I saw darkish b+w newsreels in the movies of the capilla ardiente a word that means a fired chapel but is simply a hocus pocus name for a place where a body lies in state with lots of candles and military guards. The music was Beethoven, Chopin and Lalo and there were many closeups of grieving descamisados (Peronist shirtless ones as Perón called his followers). Eva Perón was my first taste or awareness of human death. I was 9. Every evening when I was put to bed my mother turned on the radio. It did not matter what station it was as the program was always interrupted at 20:25. "It is 20:26," an Orson Welles voice boomed, "the hour when Eva Perón, the spiritual leader of our nation gained immortality."

In the fall of 1966 my Armenian uncle Leo Mahdjoubian phoned. He didn't pull any punches. He simply told me, "Your father kicked the bucket yesterday and you should know." My father had died (DOA at the Pirovano Hospital) with enough money in his pocket that I was able to pay for a modest funeral. It was the first time in my life (once again for my mother) that I went shopping for a coffin. There was enough money left over to pay for a 7 year residence in Chacarita the large Buenos Aires cemetery where the masses are buried.

On March 27, 1982 I purchased a ticket (number 175) to go to an underground concert with my favourite alternative band, the Popularos (below, with Art Bergmann middle row, right). It was my lucky night because I won the white Pontiac hearse. The organizers gave me the choice of the car or $500. I took the money. I put $250 in the bank and then bought $250 worth of beer (that was lots back on 1982) and invited all my alternative musician friends to a party. The beer was put into a bath tub. By the end of the night Zippy Pinhead (second row, left) was carried away and I was able to confirm there was still beer left in the tub.



Sometime around 1989 I bought an air gun at Three Vets. It was a beautiful immitation .44 magnum which came with two barrels, a short one and a long one. In 1989 I was an eager but mostly ignorant gardener and I thought our garden squirrels were out to eat all our spring bulbs (I was partly right). I made the decision that I would shoot the varmints (that fine word the Americans like to use). But I decided I was going to give the little animals a spoorting chance by not wearing my glasses. I would quietly but suddenly open the kitchen door and then raise my gun. I would aim and shoot. I managed to get one. I saw it leap up when I shot it and it disappeared in a hosta bed. I went out searching and found the little animal agonizing but still alive. The animal was suddenly that wren from so long ago in my Buenos Aires garden. I gave the squirrel its coup de grâce and retired the gun on a table in the living room. When Hilary (not yet Rebecca or Lauren's mother) found out she told me that if I attempted to shoot any more squirrels she was going to call the SPCA. A few weeks later we had a burglar who stole my stereo, my CDs and the gun. When I made my insurance claim I kept the offending gun from the list.

In 1989 I returned to Argentina for the first time since 1967. I visited my half brother Enrique and my nephews. One in particular, Patricio (affectionately nicknamed Pato or Duck) was especially interested in all things George as they all call my father and their grandfather. Patricio asked me about Chacarita and I told him that George's tomb would not be there anymore as they would have dug it up after 7 years and thrown its contents into a mass grave or filled some hole with its rubble. He looked at me with disgust. I forgot about it. A couple of days later Patricio came up to me and threw a little square marble stone on the table. He almost hit me with it. "I looked at the records to find where George was buried and located a Juana Esmeralda. She took George's place. I found this white pebble. Perhaps it had some contact with his bones."



Death has been in my thoughts of late here here and here. I have been at it for years because of my exposure to philosopher and teacher Ramón Xirau who taught me about Epicurus of Samos in 1964.

For years I have avoided reading the books of British author Julian Barnes simply because he has a startling resemblance to a friend of mine, Michael Metcalf (seen below to the right of his father Ben) who committed suicide with a drug overdose. But I had to finally rescind my own prohibition and last night I began his latest nothing to be frightened of (Random House Canada 2008). Barnes describes his father's death:



He died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse, months - indeed, years - after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was was being offered were unimpressive. My mother had seen him a few days previously, but then suffered an attack of shingles. On that final visit, he had been confused. She had asked him, characteristically, 'Do you know who I am? Because the last time I was here, you didn't know what I was.' My father had replied, just as characteristically,'I think you are my wife.'

In the New York Times review of Barnes's book Garrison Keillor states:

I don't know how this book will do in our hopeful country, with the author's bleak face on the cover, but I will say a prayer for retail success. It is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head.



I am happy to report that so far I agree and furthermore I would like to add that the Canadian edition of nothing to be frightened of does not have Julian Barnes's bleak face on the cover.