July 31 2020 - Photograph - Rebecca Anne Stewart

 At first, as a boy, I was ambivalent about luck. It seemed on my block on Melián, in Coghlan, a suburb of Buenos Aires, that the only people who won the lottery lived across the street. On the other hand the only people who died were my neighbours. That, even at my young age, seemed to be a balanced state of affairs.

After close to 45 years of working in an unventilated darkroom while smoking a pipe (I gave it up 20 years ago) and immersing my processed photographs and b+w negatives into Kodak Selenium Toner (a known carcinogen that helped make them archival) at my age of 78, I am in more or less good health. I know I will never win the lottery but death will come to me (soon perhaps) and not to my neighbour.

I am thankful for those 78 years as I believe that after half a century, anything extra is just plain good luck.

In my heart I am grateful to all the women who preceded me (while not ignoring my father). There was my grandmother who educated me, and my mother who wasted good money on my education. And then the women after. My Rosemary who married me in Mexico City in1968 and took my life and put order into it, She gave me two more women, our daughters Alexandra and Hilary and decided we needed to move to Vancouver where our lives might be better (and they were). And then Hilary had two daughters, our granddaughters Rebecca and Lauren. 

In our little Kitsilano home we have a beautiful orange and white cat called Niño. But it is his sister Niña who rests on my lap when I am in bed. It is then that I know that my life is one in which I must give thanks. And this I do.