My Rosemary - The Hoarder
Friday, December 11, 2020
 | Rosemary- Grade 10 - Age 14 - I958
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My Rosemary was a hoarder. She kept beverything. Our eldest
daughter Ale is going through her extensive files and is showing me stuff I
have never seen like the school pictures here. My Rosemary would have made a
very good poker player as she kept everything inside. I talked to her about my
family to the point I must have bored her. Of her family I knew little and of
former boyfriends, absolutely nothing.
In one of those actions that I never thought I ever had to
do or even have a concept of, it was necessary for me to provide a marriage
certificate so my Rosemary can be converted into ashes. I did not know where to
look for such a thing. There is a reason for this.
When we first attempted to be married in Mexico City in 1968, the Mexican judge told
us that since I was not a Mexican but a Mexican immigrant and Rosemary was
Canadian I needed permission from Gobernación (the Mexican Secretary of
External Affairs). We thought this was not true and the idea of going through
the bureaucracy was something we wanted to avoid. So we tried two other judges
in different places in the city. We got the same negative reception. Since this
was taking weeks my friends and family kept asking me if I had married
Rosemary. My mother lived in Veracruz so coming to Mexico City was not an easy
thing.
On our fourth attempt (my mother was not present) I went to
see a judge in the lovely and historic México City neighbourhood of Coyoacán. I
took with me an expensive bottle of French Cognac for the judge. Our friend Raúl Guerrero
Montemayor was one of the witnesses, the others we brought in from the street. We were married, at last!
Tonight Ale placed in front of me our marriage certificate
and told me, “Abi helped me find it.” Abi is how my family called Rosemary (a
shortcut for the Spanish abuelita for
grandmother). I may have looked perplexed as before Rosemary died I am sure Ale
never discussed the certificate. It seems that this idiot and non-perceptive
father failed to realize that Ale had channelled Rosemary and that is why the
document was found.
Rosemary hoarded fine purses, beautiful shoes, bills for everything we bought, tax records that went back 20 years cut out
articles from the NYTimes we ever bought for our daughters and kept just about everything
else - and, yes school pictures.
Here you will see part of Rosemary’s collection of reading
glasses. My daughter Hilary wears glasses so she will pick one of these frames
and I will go and have her prescription put into it. Rosemary always felt uncomfortable wearing glasses. When we arrived in Vancouver in 1975 she got contact lenses.You can imagine what it was like in our Burnaby home on Springer Avenue, when before we were to go out to a party or the movies she would drop one of her contacts on our "delightful" shag carpet! My Rosemary is no more
Smelling behind the ears On the same wings, these two can fly My Rosemary's nine beds Esa rubia en especial Deo gratias
My Rosemary is No More
Thursday, December 10, 2020
Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward – April 19
1944 – December 9 2020  | December 9, 2020 7:35 PM
|
Smelling behind the ears
On the same wings, these two can fly My Rosemary's nine beds Esa rubia en especial Deo gratias
Smelling behind the ears
Wednesday, December 09, 2020
There is an expression I like to use that connects to being behind the camera. It is, “Who
shaves the barber?”
Of late in this pandemic my Rosemary and I have have been
spending a lot of time on or in bed. We read the newspapers, check CNN in our
phones and I try to tackle the novel that will represent for me this year,
Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela.
I wrote about my Rosemary’s 9 beds here but I had not been
able to find a picture of her on any of those beds. I know I took pictures in
the Kerrisdale (Athlone) bed of Rosemary tutoring our youngest daughter Hilary
or her two daughters Lauren and Rebecca (all on math) but I have not been able
to find them.
In pile of snapshots and negatives that I am sorting that
are all in our dining room I found the one used to illustrate this blog. Thanks
to my 17-year-old Photoshop I was able to salvage some detail from the terrible
print. The photograph is of the both of us (I have no memory who shot it) in
our Athlone bed and you can note that the bed has no headboard.
But on our first night on that bed in 1986 I remember being
able to look out and see how beautiful our neighbourhood was.
I can remember when we first held hands. How electric it
was! Somehow the first kiss is not there in my head. After 52 years of marriage
I can report that while some might think that in most marriages passion
subsides with time, I can correct that assumption by pointing out that, somehow,
love for me, does not diminish into affection but quite the opposite. It
becomes a lovely (the correct adjective) affection in which holding hands or a
kiss on the cheek is exquisite. And this we do a lot now. And from my mother I
have kept the tradition of smelling Rosemary behind the ears.
on the same wings, these two can fly
Sunday, December 06, 2020
 | Rosemary & Niña - 5 December 2020
|
XXXII
If love is chaste, if pity comes from heaven,
If fortune, good or ill, is shared between
Two equal loves, and if one wish can govern
Two hearts, and nothing evil intervene:
If one soul joins two bodies fast for ever
And if, on the same wings, these two can fly,
And if one dart of love can pierce and sever
The vital organs of both equally:
If both love one another with the same
Passion, and if each other’s good is sought
By both, if taste and pleasure and desire
Bind such a faithful love-knot, who can claim,
Either with envy, scorn, contempt or ire,
The power to untie so fast a knot?
Michelangelo – translated by Elizabeth Jennings
Michelangelo's sonnets
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