Today is New Year’s Eve and melancholy is setting in spite of the warm company of Niño and Niña. On my way home from the YVR airport, back from Buenos Aires, I told my driver to pass by the West Boulevard Feline Hilton.

The trip to Argentina was not what I thought it would be. I would sit in Hotel Claridge lobby wingchair in wait of Rosemary who was to come down from our room in the elevator (or so it seemed).

It was in Mexico many years ago that Rosemary and I adopted the Spanish custom of eating 12 grapes each before midnight. I went around the corner and bought the grapes. Tonight I will eat 24.

At the Ateneo bookstore, around the corner from my hotel, I found this lovely book of love poems by a passionate Argentine poet (a feminist to boot) Alfonsina Storni who is virtually unknown outside her country (although she was born in Switzerland).  I have other books of hers but this one is special. I had a moment of strange awareness two days ago as I was reading it in that Claridge Hotel wingchair.

Links to more of my Alfonsina Storni blogs

I have come to realize that somehow my future is behind me and my past is in front of me. I look into that past as if it is now and I see that first image of Rosemary sometime at the end of 1967. In my mind and out loud I call out here name and think of her as the young 23-year-old I met when I was just 25.It is as if I am about to have my first date with her.

There was one poem, whose title and last sentence hit me like a blow.

Tú, que nunca serás…

Tu, que nunca serás del todo mío.

You, who will never be…

You, who will never be all mine.

I seems I am falling in love with a girl I just met all over again.