These days I begin my blogs with “now that I am 80”, a lot.

If you consider that I started my life without a telephone or a refrigerator and used a fountain pen in my school you can understand that I am old faded crust.

Kathie Fernandez, Scott Rumble, Leslie Dala, Neil craighead & Robin Driedeger

Such is the level of change in this century that while I am amazed (and I adopt some the changes) I am also affected in a forlorn way.

What makes writing a blog a sad affair this April 8, 2023, is that when I started it in January 2006 I had no idea what a blog was. I quickly removed the ability for folks to comment. There were many nasty people then.

In 2006 the blog was a popular diversion and social media had not yet emerged in full force. After a while I realized that my blog was a sort of “dear diary” and I put lots of personal feelings into it. Now the much more savvy digital generation are not savvy enough to realize that my blog is on my web page and that what I put into Facebook and Twitter is not my blog but a link with a photograph. The savvy folk believe that if I do not “post” into social media I have not blogged.

In whatever way you look at all the above I am consciously aware that what I write is a bit more than a “dear diary”. I try my best not to rant or to place here my political or religious beliefs.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic and educated by my very Roman Catholic grandmother. I was sent to a Catholic boarding school, St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas from 1958 to 1961.

Except for Holy Orders, Matrimony and Extreme Unction I received all the other sacraments. My theology teacher Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. taught us that the almost forgotten but important sacrament is Confirmation. This sacrament make one a soldier of Christ, not in the sense of swords and guns, but at being able to explain Catholic Doctrine to anybody who may ask. I was taught well and I can do this with efficiency.

At this age all I will reveal about my faith is that when my Rosemary was about to die on 9 December 2020 we both knew we would never meet again.

I wonder how many people today would be shocked as I was when in Buenos Aires, in April 8, 1966 when I was sitting on a bench of the Buenos Aires zoo in my summer Argentine Navy conscript whites I was reading the Is God Dead? Time Magazine article with that cover I will never forget?

On Good Friday (Viernes Santo) my grandmother would call me into the house around 1:30 in the afternoon. I was 8. I remember that she, my mother and I would kneel and Abuelita would recite Jesus’ seven words from the cross. I was not allowed to listen to the radio.

I would define that day as a sombre and solmemn day. Some of that remains. For me today is not at all a happy day.

It is a day that I use to reflect on how I got here and wonder where I am headed in what is left of my life.

The anticipation of Easter Sunday after a Viernes Santo and a Sábado de Gloria is a happy one in which the plants of my garden represent to me a resurrection, a coming back of my perennials. It is also sadly a happy anticipation clouded by the loss of my Rosemary and that I cannot share the garden with her except in memory.

Today Holy Saturday I received a kind invitation to attend the Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Orpheum by Leslie Dala. I turned down his original invite telling him I did not have the heart to go alone. He insisted so I was accompanied by his wife Rosalind (red hair!). After the concert we indulged in that lovely Vancouver tradition of going through that always unlocked door on stage right and go backstage where we greeted Dala and the singers.

All in all Sábado de Gloria was not all that somber. Why?

I went to GardenWorks on Lougheed earlier in the day to buy several  Hosta ‘Sunny Halcyon’.  This, usually blue and extremely elegant hosta  as Hosta ‘Halcyon’ put a smile on my face in spite of the rain. In hosta lingo H. 'Halcyon' sported into H. 'Sunny Halcyon'.