I must diverge from the above (but will quickly connect the dots) by mentioning that the Web has brought a Colt .45 Peacemaker type of situation in what at one time was that distinguished writers, actors, musicians and film directors at the top were protectedfrom us by impenetrable publicists whose sole reason for existence was to prevent access.

But now many of these gifted Man (men) on the High Castle (and women, too!) have been brought down and have become accessible in the same way the Colt made the supreme gunslinger obsolete.

That web version of the Colt is the vastly more cerebral Twitter (let’s deprecate here Facebook in its almost constant feline banality).

You see I am able to communicate with several writers through Twitter. I can cite @GreatDismal (William Gibson), Manhattan’s Jerome Charyn, London’s Robert Wilson, former Canadian Poet Laureate George Bowering, my Mexican author friends Paco Taibo II and Homero Aridjis plus I have had a couple of replies from that prolific tweeter Margaret Atwood.

I can happily report (and here is where I connect the dots) that Ian Rankin is also on Twitter.

I sent him a link to my time blog and this was his reply:

@alexwh Interesting piece. I often mull over TS Eliot's take on time in Four Quartets...

As you can imagine I was thrilled and I immediately corrected that vacuum in my life of not having ever read Elliot’s The Four Quartets.

The first one Burnt Norton begins like this:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                                   But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

                                  

There is an incident in Ian Rankin’s latest John Rebus novel – Even Dogs in the Wild in which a dead person runs away. I too have read Kate Atkinson’s LifeAfter Life which happens to be one of the finest and at the same time most disturbing novels I have read in years. To find out that Rankin and I share a predilection for Atkinson feels good to me.

I have now noted (I had not seen any of the John Rebus TV films until this week) that the producers were smart enough not to begin with Rebus at the beginning but at Black & Blue (two novels after Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke first appears in Black). They time-traveled with a good reason as those who know (and I am one of them) know that Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke turns the tables with John Rebus’s career.

As for me I am happily re-reading (over and over) those Four Quartets.

So my experience of Remembrance Day is limited to the many books I have read and have in my library about the world’s wars. My experience in the Argentine  Navy preceded the Falklands’s War. The only pang of pain I ever felt about that war was seeing on TV an Argentine  Navy Skyhawk skimming across the horizon during the Battle of Goose Green and watching it suddenly explode into a puff. I had a few years before translated from English into Spanish the operating and maintenance manuals for these planes that had been purchased from the United States.

I told myself that the pilot officer had chosen to be a career military man so his demise did not affect me. I did not know him. But I knew his plane in great detail! I did feel sorry for all those Argentine conscripts who were ill-equipped, poorly trained and no match for a real professional army.

While walking in the debris of our garden (many of the plants we have taken in a van to my daughter’s property in Lillooet) I noticed one rose in bloom. In my shady garden this is a rare occurrence in November. The rose is an English Rose called Brother Cadfael. Some years ago I took a lovely  gicleé scan of the rose to my mentor Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. as a gift. A couple of months later I visited him and noticed that over his guest my print had been handsomely framed (he made the frame) and that it had a brass plaque with the name of the rose and that I had given it to him.

Brother Edwin died in 2013. I miss him. Rosa ‘Brother Cadfael’ in bloom today is a fine remembrance of the man who helped me become one.

I sniffed at the rose and I said in my mind those wonderful words from  Luke 22:19-20 King James Version

“…this do in remembrance of me.”

When I come into my present house the first thing I see is a Sterling silver mirror on the front table. I have affection for it because it was my mother’s. 

Because we lived in a small house in my youth I believe I must have had a day-bed of sorts. The fact is that I remember my mother getting ready to go to teach school. She would be in front of her tocador applying makeup and doing her hair. This was during the late 40s and early 50s. She had very straight hair which she hated. She wore a bun behind her much like that of her contemporary, Eva Perón. For those who might not know, in order to have that bun, you had to carefully wrap your long hair around an artificial (it may have been real hair) doughnut-shaped bun. She often would raise her voice in desperation when it didn’t work and she would have to try again. She used the silver hand mirror to look at how the bun was going. Before dealing with the bun she had a beautiful silver brush (which I also have) and she would brush and brush her hair. She often told me how her aunt Ventura would comb and comb her hair and she (my mother as a very young girl) would cry in pain.  Ventura would state, “In order to be a lady one must learn to experience pain.”

Soon after we arrived in Mexico in 1954 the bun disappeared and I never heard my mother complain again.