A Kitsilano Halloween 

 Halloween - Nobody Knocked

Halloween - Bah humbug! 

Those Exciting Georgia Straight Halloween covers 

Rebecca prepares for Halloween 

Lauren's take on Halloween

I am not the kind of person who likes Halloween. I loathe it. In Argentina we did not have this holiday. Sometime in the early 70s a couple of poor and very dirty boys rang our door bell to our little house in Arboledas, Estado de Mexico. They looked at me forlornly and said, “Danos nuestro jaloyn,” or “Give us our Halloween.” I was shocked to see that the incroaching American culture was now close to home. I may have given them the coins they wanted. Probably, now in retrospect, I would think that the coins were sugar-free.

Once in Canada, and living in Burnaby, in the mid to late 70s I have almost fond memories of my daughters, Ale and Hilary coming into the house all wet because of the bitter rain outside with their booty. It was then that I told Rosemary that I was not going to answer the door. Until last year and including it, few showed up  at Halloween. Rosemary was not well by then as she died a a month later on December 9. I did not answer the door.

I feel both ashamed and sad about my Halloween attitude. I am making up for it by now doing all the things that Rosemary did for us like taking out the garbage, cleaning the cats’ kitty litter box, paying our bills and all those other activities that I was either too stupid to understand or unwilling to do.

Tomorrow Halloween, I know I will have few knocks on the door. I will turn off the lights and not open the door. This monster will be upstairs on the bed thinking of my Rosemary and how Halloween and Christmas were activities that were intimately part of her life.

I will not take out the Christmas decorations or buy a Christmas tree.

I do not have the heart.

L Rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent', Rosa 'Ebb Tide'& Helichrysum petiolare  29 October 2021

Because my blog is when I think about it a Dear Diary kind of thing I often write stuff that is a tad personal and my family objects a lot. There is that conundrum of making a blog have content, relevant content to my life without offending others. It is not easy.                                                                                                              

Today I went to pick up my new Windows10 computer. I will not plug it in for a few day as I scan the last plants of the season and I consider the problem which I will ultimately solve of converting the new computer to have an ambivalent keyboard. With this computer if I press the Alt key I can get ¡¡¡¡¡, ¿¿¿¿¿, ééé, ñññ, and even ö. It is the most convenient method for me as I write in two languages. I know that the solution with the Windows10 will not be self-evident. I am in fear. This is something strange as I always felt excited when I brought a brand new camera home or as recently my new Epson digital projector with which I plan to bore my Buenos Aires family with a slide show!

As I approach December 9, when my Rosemary died,  I know I will not have the inclination of buying a Christmas tree and taking out the decorations from storage. I plant to give my family cheques and I will not buy or wrap Christmas gifts. Rosemary was a keen and very good wrapper. It seems I keep repeating this a lot, “I don’t have the heart to…,” a lot. I simply don’t. The idea of a family Christmas Eve dinner is also something I will not plan for. Traditionally I would make a roast beef (partially in the barbecue) and Rosemary her famous Yorkshire Pudding. I would make the gravy. Again I am not doing any of that.

I keep thinking that I must be a person who might enjoy feeling sorry for himself. I do not get any pleasure. What makes it all worse is that my Niño and Niña cats stare at me when I am not cuddling them or they are cuddling me. I feel bad if I don’t give them attention I feel guilty. "What to they know?" "What do they remember?" These are questions that I keep asking myself.

Today was a sunny day so I took Niño for a walk. He is beautiful to look at and he follows me quite well.  I imagine he smiles somewhere inside. I take Rosemary’s route and while I do not believe in ghosts I sense the vacuum of a presence, if there is such a thing.

Because the 21^st century has brought us the utility of Google I became curious of the origin of the term “nature abhors a vacuum.” I found it in Wikipedia and I was pleasantly surprised that its origin is ancient and attributed to Aristotle.

In physics, horror vacui, or plenism (/ˈpliːnɪzəm/), commonly stated as "nature abhors a vacuum", is a postulate attributed to Aristotle, who articulated a belief, later criticized by the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius, that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void. He also argued against the void in a more abstract sense (as "separable"), for example, that by definition a void, itself, is nothing, and following Plato, nothing cannot rightly be said to exist. Furthermore, insofar as it would be featureless, it could neither be encountered by the senses, nor could its supposition lend additional explanatory power. Hero of Alexandria challenged the theory in the first century AD, but his attempts to create an artificial vacuum failed. The theory was debated in the context of 17th-century fluid mechanics, by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, among others, and through the early 18th century by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.

Just about everybody I know recommends the ultimate Canadian solution to ills, “Get counselling.”

I argue against this as my grief is made worse (but in one respect more complex, almost interesting) because I think of it all as philosophical problem. Having had a very good philosophy instructor for a year in Mexico in the early 60s in Ramón Xirau I could explain right here the objections of the Greek Atomist, Epicurus and the Roman Atomist, Lucretius cited in the above Wikipedia excerpt.

I don’t know how they, the Atomists, would sense me noting, noticing, and sensing the presence of my Rosemary simply because the presence is not there. Leibniz and Newton also cited, co-discovered without consultation with each other the Calculus. In calculus those minuscule infinitesimals that never disappear, they become smaller and smaller, and reach nonexistence at infinity.

The dent that Rosemary’s body made on our bed just before she died and then when she did die and we waited for her (her?) to be taken away (they were very efficient and quick) will never quite disappear. Unless I burn the mattress.

Is this what I sense of her when I walk Niño? Or is it simply thinking about it conjures that nonexistent presence?

I believe that at age 79 my grief will not go away. But, it will, when I reach my inevitable oblivion. Why did not Newton and Leibniz call their infinity oblivion?

 This sorry blog is illustrated with a scan of what may be the two last roses of the season.

 But I spoke too soon as I remembered that I have roses in the back lane. In this second scan I have added what I found Rosa ‘Shropshire Lad’ with a bloom and two buds.Rosemary planted those Helichrysum (commonly called the licorice plant) as companions to our roses. With the roses waning it is pristine and startling gray/white. Perhaps I should call it Rosemary's Ghosts.

Same as above but with Rosa 'Shropshire Lad'

Geranium 'Rozanne' 27 October 2021

Today October 27, 2021 I am now not much better in dealing with my grief over the loss of my Rosemary on December 9, 2020.

But there are some things that have kept me able to cope from day to day.

I believe that all humans, even those that live alone, need affection. I do get affection, lots of it, from my sticky orange and white cats, Niño and Niña. They are constantly at my side and fight at night as to which one will sleep closest to me when I turn off the lights.

Geranium 'Rozanne' 25 October 2010

Of course love’s other side is always guilt and I feel terrible when I must leave them alone to go shopping. My grief has been so bad of late that without having the cats I would point my Chevrolet Cruze in any direction out of Vancouver. I cannot do that. My planned trip to Buenos Aires either in December or January, my drive alone in March to Rosemary’s New Dublin and my presentation (the beauty of hosta flowers) in June at the American Hosta Society National Convention in Minneapolis will force me to check the cats into the West Boulevard Feline Hilton.

As important is my being able to go to my garage oficina and sit down in front of my computer to either write a blog or scan plants from the garden. Writing every day is sanity for my soul.

For quite a few days I have not had a computer. This computer’s contents were being migrated (the word in fashion now) into a brand new one that I am having Bensen at Powersonic Computers put together for me. I was able to retrieve yesterday that Windows 7 computer that Bensen says will serve me as a backup. And today I picked up my scanner that had the glass bed changed. It had scratches and deposits on the inside from evaporating solvents from the scanner’s plastic innards.

So here I am writing this, feeling the relief that I was able to scan a few last roses of the season.

But a few days ago I placed in social media (Twitter and Facebook) a scan of Rosemary’s Geranium ‘Rozanne’ which I did on October 25 2010 in the old house in Kerrisdale. I wondered?

Geranium 'Rozanne' 27 October 2021

And yes under a hosta I found today one bloom (the others must be long gone because of the rain and the heat of the summer). It is not perfect. But it made me smile. It was the presence of my Rosemary and her fondness for the colour blue that will mean that tonight I just might get a good night’s sleep.

And I must finish this by pointing out a happy event from yesterday. I received an email from Indigo telling me that a book I had ordered back in May was now available.