It was not long after I got my first driver’s license (a Veracruz one) in 1967 that I married Rosemary. I had met her at the end of that year and we were married on 8 November 1968. I decided to teach her to drive in the blue VW you see in the picture here. She hit a rock and that was the end of the lesson.

I quickly found out you do not teach a marriage partner to drive. We had to wait until we arrived in Vancouver in 1975. A Dutch man (at the time I thought he was a saint) taught Rosemary to drive.

In all the years she ever drove (unlike this idiot macho man) the only accidents she ever had were people bashing her parked car.

Rosemary would go to visit her mother in Brockville in winter. At the Ottawa airport she would rent a car in the evening and drive to Brockville in a snow storm.

That was my Rosemary.

I have written at length and often on how we humans have this human talent to associate. Yes, I know that my cats react to making a noise with a spoon on their tinned food. We are much better at association.

Going down or up the stairs I see many of my family portraits every day. I smile a bit but I mostly feel melancholic. The photographs represent moments that will not return and indicate that I now have a fractured family situation with no more roast beef/Yorkshire Pudding Christmas dinners (we always celebrated Christmas Eve).

When I looked at this recently gold framed sandwich photograph of Rosemary (a fave right now), I knew I had to find some sort of association so I could scan and write. The frame with my driver’s licenses is in my oficina.

And so here we have it. My Rosemary was as good a driver as Argentine F1 World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio. And yes I have had accidents that did not happen in the parking lot.