Recently I wrote a blog featuring one of Rosemary’s Argentine shoes.

Shoes, Mentors & Joan Didion

Today, Thursday 17 November, I had a brief visit by my youngest daughter (50) Hilary Stewart. I fed her and did not take her home. She was adamant that my car was too small and she had developed the sniffles this morning. She did not want me to catch her cold. I was left a tad sad as I enjoy our drives to Burnaby.

She noticed the two shoes on my living room table and I said, “They make me melancholic when I look at them. They remind me of Abi (the name my family gave to Rosemary as an approximation of abuelita (little grandmother in Spanish).”

Her correction floored me, “They are Abi.”

How can inanimate objects be a person? I would not contest her statement as somehow she must be right.

Inanimate objects have a vivid and important part in my life. Of late it has been my Fuji X-E3 that does what it wants without my input. Could this be inanimate free-will? Below a complete accident (somehow my Fuji XE3 did not work properly on panoramic mode) that happened last week on a very cold morning at Nitobe Garden.

Nitobe Garden - 6 November 2022

Luckily the free-will manifestations of my Fuji have produced lovely accidents which I have been able to repeat to my delight.

When I took this Polaroid portrait of Rosemary back around 1975 in Burnaby I did not give it a second glance and put it into a box. It was only last year that I saw it again and noticed something exquisite about the portrait. It would seem that Polaroid came to rescue and shoved me into a realization of the beauty of the image.

In that past century design used the dictum that “form follows function”. In some way that steers me into the direction that objects do communicate with humans and indeed King Arthur could not fail with his Excalibur in hand. 

Sword Excalibur & Decisive Moments

I have felt the same when using my favourite cameras. They all exercise their free-will to my benefit.                  

I have a document that records the fact that I crossed the equator in an Argentine merchant marine ship, the Rio Aguapey (on my way back from Buenos Aires with Veracruz as my destination) on 11 December 1966. By January of 1967 I was rudderless at see with shoulder-length hair.

Somehow in Veracruz I found out about the hippies.  I decided to become one (minus the drugs). I went to San Francisco to the Haight/Ashbury district and stayed with my friend Robert Hijar. The folks on the bottom floor, avid pot smokers, did not want to try my Argentine mate as they said it looked addictive. I began to read Ramparts Magazine.

While in San Francisco I managed to see Jefferson Airplane and buy a little ceramic peace sign for my lapel.

By December of the year I was teaching English in Mexico City ( I was told to cut my hair) and at the school I met my Rosemary. We were married in February 1968.

At the time there was rampant machismo in the city. Men never carried umbrellas when it rained as this was deemed effeminate. I decided to start using a purse. All my friends made fun of me. The said I was from "el otro lado" (the other side).

For most of 2022 and 2021 I have worn around my neck a Herschel case where I store my wallet, sunglasses, business cards, a marking pen and my face mask is clipped to it. The case is not large enough to accommodate my phone. This presents a problem of forgetting it when I leave the house. My house and car keys I clip in a fob on my belt loop.

Rosemary had exquisite taste for clothing and she had a keen love for Italian shoes and purses. She did buy them also in Buenos Aires to my delight.

I have no idea what is going to happen to Rosemary’s collections of her purses. I thought of giving a couple to my granddaughters but it seems that using purses is not in fashion with them.

When I spotted the Francesco Biasia black leather purse I knew what I was going to do with it. It is large enough not only for my phone, but if I remove the lens from my Fuji X-E3 they fit just right. And finally I can also put in my little note book in which I do my best to emulate Rosemary’s talent for organization. 

Top Rosa 'Abraham Darby', middle R. 'William Shakespeare 2000' below R. 'The Shropshire Lad' and  R. 'Robin Hood'14 November 2022

In 1963/64 I was studying engineering at the University of the Americas in Mexico City. In that past century any man who wanted to achieve success and lure a woman into marriage had to either be and architect, a lawyer or an engineer. There were no other professions.

But when I began electricity I could not understand the difference between resistance, inductance and capacitance. I failed electricity, and my conundrum on what I was going to do with my life, was temporarily solved by having been drafted into the Argentine Navy.

Sometime in late 1967 on a trip to San Francisco I was in a cable car that at a stop many of the youths got off. I asked them where they were going and they told me that they were studying photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. I had no idea that photography could be a profession.

It was only later, by 1974 that I became a portrait photographer in Mexico City and upon moving with Rosemary and our two daughters to Vancouver I ultimately became a magazine photographer.

It was only then that I realized that capacitance and capacitors in my flash units stored energy and made the flash bursts possible.

In my life (I am now 80) I have been an English teacher, a high school teacher, a university Spanish professor, a car washer (In Canada it’s Tilden) a magazine photographer and lastly a writer.

Now there are all kinds of professions I had no idea would exist in that other century such as writing code.

All the above has something to do with another term I learned at my engineering in physics. It is called potential energy. You can compute the possibility of a book lying in the middle of a table to fall off the edge with no human help. The event can be unlikely but not impossible.

To me the concept of potential energy remedies the idea that a past definition for why Edison was a genius is that he knew the one thing he had to do with his life.

We have the potential of doing many things and with a longer life span we can have many professions.

But what of the potential of a rose bud in mid-November? I know that the buds in today’s scan have no chance of ever opening. Are they finished? Yes they are finished for this season. They are perennials and they will come back in late May.

For me this cements in a most positive way that we humans should never give up.

We have the potential, and to sort of borrow that electrical term, the capacity to excel on something new within ourselves.

My 25-year-old granddaughter is unsure in what to do with her life. I told her that there were three professions that do not need diplomas. Two of them are writing and photography. The third one, which I told her was not for her, is prostitution.