Lunch on the deck of the U.S. Monitor - note black man on foreground right - Mathew Brady

 I am an Argentine born man of mixed heritage (English, Spanish, Chinese and Basque). All my life I attended American schools (elementary, high school and college) so I was subjected to a thorough immersion into American History. It was particularly soat St. Edward’s High School, a Catholic boarding school in Austin, where my history teacher was Brother Francis Barrett, C.S.C. a most liberal and intelligent member of the Congregation of Holy Cross.  His explanations on what led to the American Civil War were as accurate as they could have been at the time in the mid 50s.

It was in the mid 50s that I went with my 9th grade class to Washington DC. I remember that all the outdoor stalls and curio shops carried merchandise that was evenly divided between the Confederate and Union army. Blue or gray hats and flags of both were on sale everywhere.

It is important that I note that while I might have harboured some sort of admiration for General Lee that my heart and interests where with the Union Army of Abraham Lincoln and his generals, in particular Ulysses S. Grant.

But I have to confess that even if Brother Francis was thorough in explaining about the origins of the war in relation to slavery somehow the Civil War had only two colours, blue and gray. There was no black anywhere.

And I must confess, further with some embarrassment that it was so until  1989 when Rosemary and I went to a fine little movie theatre in Port Townsend and saw Edward Zwick’s Glory with Denzel Washington (playing Private Silas Trip), Matthew Broderick (Col. Robert Gould Shaw) and Morgan Freeman as Sgt. Major John Rawlins. This film which finally showed intimations of Mathew Broderick being a really good actor, was about the role of the 54^th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (all black) in the battle of Fort Wagner.

I am now a Canadian and as I see the turmoil behind the acceptance and rejection of the Confederate battle flag I am having a small but measurable internal issue with the idea of the removal of the name Robert E. Lee from schools and streets. I know that particularly because those Civil War photographs were in b+w they lacked the colour of blood and gore. Those battles seemed to me (until now?) to have been fought between armies that at heart were led by gentlemen. Just the protocol that Grant used in the surrender at Appomattox is a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Will re-reading that lovely novel, Richard Adams’s Traveller (Lee’s horse in retirement recounts his experience in war with a barn cat) be the same again?  Would John Brown, now, be seen as sane man?

Members of Company E., 4th U.S.Colored Troops formed in Baltimore in 1863

Luckily I am not an American so I can disassociate myself a tad from all that guilt and historical revisionism.

But I am doing my part in making sure that at least my granddaughter Lauren, 13, will be aware of the true colours of the US Civil War. On Canada Day, July 1 after our backyard barbecue (complete with my famous iced tea) we will watch Glory.  

Obama's swearing in and Lincoln

Richard Mosby & that very cool Barack Obama

Desserted camp & wounded soldier in a Zouave uniform c. 1865 - Mathew Brady

We were slated to go to the opening of King Lear on Wednesday June 26. That’s the info we had. Should you look up that date you might note a discrepancy.

So on Friday June 26 we were heading to Bard at 7:25. It was then that my precise wife told me the show began at 7:30! I ran four yellow lights and found ways of avoiding others. I dropped off Rosemary as close as I could to the front entrance and then to my extreme delight found one single parking spot in the closest parking lot. Somehow I managed to navigate the complex (you need a doctorate from Stanford) parking meter and when I ran in to my seat there was a smiling Christopher Gaze who told me, “Glad you could make it chap.” He shook my hand and climbed up on the stage to make his traditional introduction speech.

Our seats (the folks at Bard must have made concessions to my mistake) had us centre second row. The action occurred “up here”. It made this Lear immediate. Or as an a description of a Stephen King novel, gripping.

I always thought that King Lear was a complex play. This Lear with marvelous enunciation from all the actors, Lear (Benedict Campbell) to The Fool (Scott Bellis) made it all perfectly understandable.

When I first read P.D. James (and I have read her complete output) in the late 70s I found her plots unrealistic. I preferred the American crime novels that featured psychopathic serial murderers. I asked myself how could so much mayhem and killing happen just because of inheritance and family wills? Slowly I have come around to disdain the psychopaths and accept that Lady James of Holland Park had it all right.

At age 72 and with two daughters and two granddaughters I can almost hear the thinking going on. Who is going to inherit this table or that picture? Why don’t they die soon so we can get a down payment on a house and stop renting? Have you noticed that Papi (that's me) is beginning to sound fuzzy? They should sell the house and put him in a home.

In our years in our leafy Athlone Street neighbourhood  I have seen perfectly fit old people be persuaded by their offspring to “downgrade” or “downsize”. I have seen them leave and within months have heart attacks or go into homes with dementia.

Which brings me to the 21^st century relevance of William Shakespeare’s King Lear. It is all about an old man who wants to divide his kingdom with his three daughters. We know that King Lear is a tragedy. We know it does not end well.

This play as I saw it was pure relevance with drama that was clear and acting that was precise.

In Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human, Bloom says the the hardest part to play is the middle sister Regan. He further mentions that he has never seen an effective Regan. I am no Bloom but I think that Jennifer Lines did a fine balance between  the nasty eldest Goneril (Colleen Wheeler) and the angelic and Fair Bianca-like Cordelia (Andrea Rankin).

Scott Bellis fooled Rosemary. His character shifting is so good that it took my Rosemary a while before she figured The Fool was Scott Bellis.It made me think that on the one hand Bellis does not have a voice one can precisely say, "Tha't Bellis," But David Marr, who plays the Earl of Gloucester could never hide his magnificent voice. Both actors take advantage of their different talents.

I have no idea why handsome black men make complex villains. This is the case with the handsome black man, Michael Blake who plays the most nasty and scheming Edmund

The direction by Dennis Garnhum featured an eye popping eye popping. When the Duke of Cornwall, Robert Klein does the trick, complete with the throwing of one eyeball (David Marr’s as Earl of Gloucester) on the stage floor. It brought back for me the horrific eye popping/eye popping scene from one of my favourite swashbucklers Henry King’s (1949), Prince of Foxes with Tyrone Power, Orson Welles (and very important) Everett Sloane who with a bunch or red grapes (the film is in b+w) convinces the nasty Cesare Borgia  that he is rendering the handsome artist Andrea Orisini (Tyrone Power) blind!

Goneril

But most of the time my eyes were directed towards Colleen Wheeler. All three sisters had the most beautiful and elaborate hair (wigs?) courtesy perhaps by Costume Designer Deitra Kalyn. Wheeler’s hair-do (all red as she has very red hair) was beautiful.

I happen to know Wheeler off-stage. She is soft, pleasant, friendly, kind. In short she would make a fortune selling Girl Guide Cookies.

But on stage she is someone else. For me I would describe her as:

Her father was Henry. Her twin sister was Sugar and he was married to Penelope. She boldly suggested to be unsexed. Has a fondness for cowboy boots and a trout. Likes dumps.

To that I would add that she would (with Lois Anderson) make one scary high school principal.’

With Lois Anderson as her only competition, Wheeler has no equal.

encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia in its article on Uqbar

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luís Borges

Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar. El espejo inquietaba el fondo de un corredor en una quinta de la calle Gaona, en Ramos Mejía; la enciclopedia falazmente se llama The Anglo-American Cyclopaedía (New York, 1917) y es una reimpresión literal, pero también morosa, de la Encyclopaedia Britannica de 1902. El hecho se produjo hará unos cinco años. Bioy Casares había cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demoró una vasta polémica sobre la ejecución de una novela en primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o desfigurara los hechos e incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permitieran a unos pocos lectores -a muy pocos lectores- la adivinación de una realidad atroz o banal. Desde el fondo remoto del corredor, el espejo nos acechaba. Descubrimos (en la alta noche ese descubrimiento es inevitable) que los espejos tienen algo monstruoso. Entonces Bioy Casares recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres. Le pregunté el origen de esa memorable sentencia y me contestó que The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia la registraba, en su artículo sobre Uqbar.

My two ex-students & the Ikea mirror

The conjunction of a mirror
Memphis Britannica  
¿Porqué nací entre espejos?  
Espejismo 
Rain is a thing that happens in the past 
Espejos 
Mirrors are not more silent 
El espejo 
Los espejos 

Plenty has been said on how one photograph is worth one thousand words. I beg to differ sometimes as a sequence of three can tell a lot more. For this one I used a Nikon FM-2 and a 35mm lens. I took the picture in one of my classes at Focal Point a photography school on 10th Avenue where I taught until it closed three years ago.

My grandmother had the ability to predict coming wars, stock market crashes and coup d’etat. She always took her family (she was a widow with two daughters and a son.

My father George died in Buenos Aires in the summer of 1965. He died on the street and a friend, a police sergeant, took him to the nearby Hospital Pirovano. The sergeant knowing how hospitals dealt with people that were brought in, emptied his pockets before anyone could touch him.

The sergeant called me a few days later and told me, “Your father was working at a laundry to make money to bribe a general so that you would be relieved of your naval conscription obligations. You could have gone home to Mexico.” The policeman handed me the money. It was enough for a modest burial at La Chacarita. Of the burial I remember nothing.

I had learned of my father’s death when Leo Mahdjubian, an almost-uncle of mine called me and said, “Your father kicked the bucket today.”

I was never smart enough to ask my father when he was born or how old he was.

My father, like many Haywards had a drinking problem. My mother persuaded him to leave home when I was 8. On weekends my father would come to take me to the movies. Sometimes he was drunk and I was embarrassed if any of my friends were playing with me in the garden. But I looked forward to our outings because I loved him. I remember he took me to see Beau Geste.

A couple of years later my mother, my grandmother and I left for Mexico and my father was not told. Years later he told me that it broke his heart.

I returned in 1965 to do my military service in Argentina as an excuse to find my father. I did and we visited on weekends. I do not remember any conversations. I have no reason as to why.

My father was a journalist but I never read anything he ever wrote. He cooked very well and told me that the secret to cooking was to learn to make sauces. He had several friends who came to visit us. One of them, Manrique, wore a shoulder holster under his jacket.

My father was handsome and looked like David Niven. His voice resembled Niven's. 

On days when my father did not return home, my mother would say, "Alex he wrote something in the Buenos Aires Herald that Perón did not like. He is in the Villa Devoto jail."

From him I inherited my ability to cook and of late I think that perhaps I can write, too.

After all these years I can remember his smell of Old Smuggler whiskey and Player’s cigarettes. I remember the roughness of his Harris Tweet jackets when he bent to kiss me. His mustache was prickly, too. I did not inherit his beautiful almost gray wavy hair.

One year Santa Claus brought me a red Schuco wind-up racer that had a suspension and a steering wheel that worked. Right after Midnight Mass and not long after I opened my present I lost the key. I cried. My father came up to me and said that Santa Claus had left a spare key.

I may have been as good a father as my father was. When I think of him I feel very English and yet I remember not only how he spoke to me in English, usually in anger but how gentle his Argentine Spanish was when all things were right with his world and mine.