Some people can follow the instructions to make a pot of loose tea, or to fix a dozen Mexican corn tortillas. But many will fail. There is some magic involved.

Our former Mexican housekeeper in Burnaby in the late 70s (we brought her so that our daughters would not lose their Spanish) Clemencia made the best Earl Grey Tea. One day I spotted her re-boiling some of it and I was shocked! I never did notice the difference. She had the touch.

It is the same with roses. Some of us can grow this rose or that one. I could never grow the multi-petalled Bourbon Roses because the blooms would never open in Vancouver’s rainy weather.

Rosarian of note, Darlene Sanders told me she had a fine specimen of Rosa ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’. I told her this could not be true (I almost called her a fibber!). So some years ago I visited her West Vancouver garden and her Souvenir de la Malmaison was glorious.

Now, yesterday Saturday, Sanders visited our garden. She brought me a little gift. You can guess exactly what the gift was. Today Sunday I scanned it.

This blog is filling a an empty hole on another day, the day before yesterday. But the date of the scan is 31 May 2020.

Perhaps someday soon Sanders might invite us for tea. I am sure that it would be excellent. But in making Mexican corn tortillas I believe she would be as good at it as I am in growing Bourbon Roses.

On Monday, Memorial Day in the US, my Rosemary and I watched William  Wyler’s 1946 film The Best Years of our Lives.

Since my mother was a fan of Dana Andrews (and Laura) I am no stranger to this film. I saw it sometime in the early 50s on a Calle Lavalle movie house in Buenos Aires.

After seeing the film I could not but go into my memory banks to write what is below.

This blog is my 5076^th since I began in January of 2006. I did not really know what a blog was then. All I knew was that it was going to be ancillary to my first (and last) web page which was up that month, too.

My first attempts at writing the blog were short and sketchy but I soon learned not to rant, to complain, or to argue about religion or politics.

Teresa Wright

I like the Spanish word bitácora which translates to ‘ship’s log’. It defines perfectly what my blog represents to me. I write my thoughts or impressions of the day. In some cases I scour through my photo files to find a match for what I may want to write. Sometimes it is the opposite. I remember or take a photograph and then try to find a poem, an excerpt from a writer I may admire or a theme for the day.

Plenty of what I write is about my past life. My eldest daughter told me once, “We like to read your blog as you reveal stuff about your life that we did not know or did not want to pry and ask.”

My blog is also a gadfly reckoning about so much of  my city, Vancouver, in which I have lived  since 1975, that I consider important for people (who may read the blog) to know and to remember. We live in a city with a poor memory for its past.

Since I began working as a magazine photographer in 1977 I learned about the delights of taking photographs to illustrate fine copy. As magazines and jobs began to fade I found that I could write the copy for my own magazine, a magazine in which space is infinite (not so with paper magazines). A virtual magazine where, in spite of a constant criticism that my copy needed a good editor or fact checker, I enjoyed being the editor, writer, photographer and art director.

That this blog may be popular, or not, is irrelevant to me. What is important is that writing it every day has helped to clear my head and now in this 2020 sequestration is one of the few things of value to myself that I perform every day.

Watching The Best Years of Our Lives cements for me that I am a product of another century in which I am not tempted by Netflix or most of the films and TV films made in this one. I am not a stranger to shouted obscenities or extreme violence. But it does not mean that I have to like them

The characters in Wyler’s film would not be believable in this century of cynicism. They are too good, too human, too complex, in their simplicity. The values of the film with one (and only one) character briefly proclaiming facts that anybody in that past century of mine would have deemed untrue (true lies) are perhaps too lofty for this century.

Film noir is awfully popular now. My Rosemary and I watch Noir Alley with Eddie Muller on TCM every Saturday at 9pm. The crux of film noir consists of characters that are flawed somewhere between being good and being bad. The women are rarely pushed around  and they know their own minds.

For me The Best Years of Our Lives is film noir. The three men coming back from the war have their flaws and are uncertain as to how to proceed. The women are valiant and even Virginia Mayo, the blonde wife of Dana Andrews knows what she wants (a man with money).

But to rest my case Teresa Wright who plays the young nurse/marriage wrecker could never be that character in any contemporary film. She is too good an actress (I am old fashioned and I like gender specific noun/professions), too lovely and she would look terrible in cleavage.

As this century soldiers on I want to get off soon.

P.S. As for Teresa Wright not looking good in cleavage I could be wrong.