Rosemary & Lauren - Christmas 2007

 Ese vacío en mi alma

 January 28 2022

At around 7:30 I give Niño and Niña their treats and I settle on the bed. Should I make myself a mug of tea? Should I have a slice of cheese or toast with apricot jam? These are the important decisions that I must make at my age of 79. Tomorrow Saturday I have nothing planned. I do not have to see anybody and as far as I know my phone will not ring.

Niña & Niño January 28 2022

I am beginning to wonder if writing a blog is enough to keep me going. In that last century women had to marry and mostly stay home. They could only be fulfilled (so they said) if they were married and had children. Nothing was said about the man’s life being fulfilled. He just had to be a successful engineer or doctor and bring home the bacon. About all that was said (mostly in jest), when a man would talk about his wife, “She is my better half.”

It has struck me tonight that at the very least that above statement acknowledges that the completion of an entity, a marriage, involves two halves. Two halves make one.

Niña & Cortázar

It is for this reason, that while my daughters say I must keep busy and find distractions, that by the end of each day, I know I cannot be fulfilled (keep that chin up) anymore because I am missing that half (and I need not add, better half as I know that).

Writing this blog and dealing with the menialities of the day with no financial worries, thanks to Rosemary, is simply not enough for me.

Niño January 28 2022

Is there any reason why I would set an alarm for 7 or 8 tomorrow? For what purpose would I get up?

My two cats stare at me and snuggle up to me. I know that if I do not wake up tomorrow (should I die in my sleep) neither of my daughters would be able to take care of them.

Is it enough to know one has to stay alive so as to comfort and take care of a pair of cats?

There may be another reason. Because I am a photographer my house has portraits on all the walls and most of them are of the family. I stare at them. While rummaging through some files I found an inkjet print. I had made a small version of it to frame for my granddaughter Lauren. The one that I almost scanned now is a copy that was not as good as the one Lauren received. I went in look for the original. I suspected it was a Polaroid. It was. It was filed under family photographs 2007. I have scanned it. Because I took the Polaroid with Christmas lighting it is virtually impossible to colour correct to any accuracy. That is not important.

There is something of their expressions. I took these Polaroids of everybody who was at our family Christmas dinner. But this one “sings”.

I must stay alive so I can keep taking these portraits even if the occasion to do them is not a frequent one. And I must stay alive to take care of Niño and Niña.

It hits me every time I look at my portraits. They were alive. I cannot forget facing Liv Ullmann who told me, “Please don’t ask me to smile.”

Hilary Anne & Alexandra Elizabeth  - Royal Hudson - 1979

Even if I begin my day facing a sunny one, by the time in late afternoon it seems like it is the late afternoon of the day before. At around 7:30 I loudly say “treats” and Niño and Niña perk up their ears and run upstairs. On the bed on their little blue blanket that Rosemary did what I do now, I give their dental treats which they love.

Queen Elizabeth Park

Then it is time to perhaps make a mug of tea and take a bath. I get into bed and in these last evenings I have been enjoying Jorge Luís Borges’s Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos.

A few years ago Hilary knowing that I take tub baths and, like Jorge Luís Borges, I read in them, gave me a special tray that I can use to read books or the newspaper while having toast and tea (or soup). The tray collapsed a few days ago when I moved suddenly and Borges took a bath. But I can still read it!

Today I decided not to become my usual morose human, comforted by two cats, but to somehow do something that might cheer me up. These photographs, of our two daughters taken before 1980, when we lived in Burnaby on Springer Ave make me smile. Those were the days when I would go to a U-Frame it Store on Kingsway and I came up with the idea of using mats that mirrored the colours in the photographs. These framed photographs look pretty good if you consider that I printed them 42 years ago in my Burnaby darkroom.

Queen Elizabeth Park

I will put up this blog and hope that tonight when I get into bed I just might be in a more optimistic mood and look forward to what tomorrow will bring.

Royal Hudson

“Porque en ese vacío vertiginoso las metáforas saltaban hacia el como arañas” Julio Cortázar

My youngest daughter Hilary Stewart paid me a visit today Wednesday. We had a long mid-afternoon lunch and then I took her to her Burnaby yoga class.

Driving back in the nighttime fog I felt a grief that I finally defined in my Spanish as “un vacío”. Because Spanish as a romance language is linked far more to Latin than English, I know that vacīvus is empty in Latin. For me, then, these words have more of an emotional impact. Vacío, vaciar (to empty), hits me in the jugular.

It was in 1958 when our religion instructor at St. Edward’s High School, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. one day came into our class and performed a little experiment that I never forgot. He brought with him two glasses, one small one, and one bigger. He also had a pitcher of water. He filled both to the brim and asked us, “Which is fuller?”

In the back row, the smartest guy in class, Howard Houston immediately answered correctly, “They are both just as full but the bigger glass has more water.”

The lesson we were then told to digest is that the two glasses represented our human capacity for happiness. Some of us have an easy time at it while others have a tough go.

It was 10 years ago that my granddaughter Rebecca (she was 14) and I were having coffee at a Starbucks on Oak Street. I have no idea why it was that I told her that we could chose in life to be either happy or to be content. It was far easier to be content and those of us who wanted to be happy might never achieve it. I then asked her, “Which of those do you want for yourself?” She answered, “I want to be happy.”

In that car tonight it hit me. Brother Edwin was back in our class giving us an eloquent variant of the full glass of happiness.

My Rosemary and I shared a 52 year marriage together. Sometimes water was spilled and sometimes the glasses (hers or mine) were not quite full. But we had the power to be happy and we were. We lived with the potential of the big pitcher and we had the patience.

People tell me that I have all these memories of having lived with Rosemary in Mexico and here in Vancouver; that we have two well-adjusted daughters and two splendid granddaughters. Would that make us be that Brother Edwin glass with a greater capacity for happiness?

What struck me tonight is that the emptiness I experienced while driving home, is best said in Spanish “ese vacío en mi alma”. It is an emptiness in my soul, a vacant presence that will be with me for as long as I am able to think.

Malecón - Cozumel

On the last days of December 2021 my nephew Georgito O’Reilly took me to the Costanera in Buenos Aires. Argentines like to be different from other Spanish speaking countries so they use or invent new words. Consider that the very legal black market US Dollar is called El dollar blue.

La Costanera - Dec 2021

In Caribbean and Mexican Spanish there is a lovely word malecón which is about a boulevard that follows a coastline (usually the sea or ocean) where people can go for pleasant walks. I did so in the Veracruz Malecón the first few months of my marriage to Rosemary. But we also had a nice walk with our two daughters in the Mexican island of Cozumel which was the first landfall by a Spaniared, Juan de Grijalva in 1518. A year later Hernán Cortes landed there to start his conquest of Mexico. 

Malecón - Veracruz 1968

 Cozumel Malecón 

Tossing and turning - Veracruz 1968 

Veracruz & Captain Robert E. Lee

Argentines call the most famous of their malecones La Costanera. When I was in the Argentine Navy in 1965, the US Navy personnel I worked with in the US Naval Advisory Group, liked to go there on weekends and warm evenings. On that Costanera there were little establishments, some on wheels, that served delicious asados and the now famous choripán which is an Argentine chorizo inside a French loaf.

La Costanera - Río de la Plata

When Georgito told me we were going to La Costanera I did not expect to see most of little eating places gone and replace by many very good restaurnants. And La Costanera has been beautifully redone and in one end they have moved the statue of Christopher Columbus that had been taken down close to the Secretaría de Guerra on Paséo Colón in downtown Buenos Aires. I mentioned to Georgito that when Rosemary and I had passed by the Secretaría de Guerra (of war) in 2019, the name had been changed to Palacio de la Paz (of peace).

At a very good restaurant Georgito and I dined very well and consumed a whole bottle of white Torrontés wine. I was left with the ganas (the desire) to have enjoyed a lowly choripán.

Georgito O'Reilly Dec 2021

I could not tell Georgito how walking on La Costanera brought me memories of walking hand in hand with my Rosemary before she got pregnant, and after, in1968 in Veracruz warm evenings on that Jarocho (another lovely word “from Veracruz”).

Senecio cineraria & Citrus x sinensis 'Blood Orange' - 25 January 2022

A bright moment (besides the constant presence of my cats Niño and Niña) in my otherwise bleak week, is a visit by my youngest daughter Hilary Stewart. I try to give her a complete meal and I wash the dishes after. She makes sure (she is the Wellness Manager, no assistants, of the Burquitlam Safeway) I have all my supplements and vitamins. She checks my mail and advises me which bills I must pay immediately. After dinner we watch the news or any video I recently brought from Buenos Aires. Then I drive her home while listening to CBC Ideas.

Because of my age she is the one who is careful about not giving me Covid. She wears a double mask and we dine at opposite ends of Rosemary’s Victorian crank table.

It is most pleasant to talk to a human being in person and better still that I am related to her.

The day before (today Tuesday January 25, 2022) I plan my menu and cook part of it.

The menu for tomorrow is my French onion soup (I now use caramelized onions), a salad, and to drink blood orange juice. Our dessert will be Shirriff Mousse with fresh strawberries.

Rosemary had a predilection (a word I use more in Spanish – predilecto) for Manila mangoes, blood oranges and gray plants.

I would say, and I can get away with it in this century, that my Rosemary was tiny, slim, dainty, graceful and feminine.

In the last century she and I went to lots of dance performances. I came up with the idea that most people thought female dancers were swans. I decided to modify that conflict and I had a good subject in Lauri Stallings. I photographed her as the woman that she was.

Now with Rosemary gone in a century where the qualities she had are now seen as not important, I miss that feminine touch in my home every day.

When I was squeezing those blood oranges I was overcome by my memory on how Rosemary had a special salad where she used them. Crossing the deck to my oficina, so I could scan one blood orange half, I noticed that one of the nicest plants, completely untouched or unfazed by the recent snow, was Senecio cineraria. I looked for Rosemary’s snow drops but they have not opened yet. Scanning them will happen when they do.

Meanwhile I will make sure our late lunch will be ready tomorrow and when Hilary and I drink our blood orange we will remember St. Luke who wrote that Christ when he was parting the bread He said, “Do this in Remembrance of me.”

One does not have to follow any religion or believe in anything to understand the beauty of that sentence, which to me is the most beautiful in any language.