Rosemary's beloved cat Casi

In my two visits to Westminster Abbey it was on the second time that I went with a mission. I was with Rosemary and our two daughters Alexandra and Hilary. I located the tile with H.G. Wells on it and I stepped on it and said, “How are you H.G.? “

My interest in death began when I first found out of its existence. I was 8 or 9, and our next door neighbours on Melián Street in Buenos Aires, had a son that had crashed his motor scooter onto a train at a level crossing. I have no idea why my mother decided I should go and see the young man in the open casket. His face was all in bandages.

From that point on and for many years I thought that the only people who died or won the lottery were our neighbours.

When Eva Perón died in 1952, Argentines mourned her loss with great ceremony. Her open coffin was  called a "capilla ardiente" or burning chapel. It was then I began to recognize the funereal music of Chopin. For over a year the time of her death interrupted all radio programs with, "It is 20:25 the hour when the spiritual head of our nation, Eva Perón entered immortality."

The second death in my life was when I had to deal with the 1966 funeral of my father in Buenos Aires. He had died on the street and his friend, a police sergeant, took him to the nearby Hospital Pirovano, where my father was declared dead. The sergeant took the liberty of emptying my father’s pockets as he would have been robbed at the hospital. He called me that evening to tell me that my father had been saving money so he could bribe a general to get me out of my stint as a conscript in the Argentine Navy and I would be sent home to my mother in Veracruz, Mexico. My father had enough money to pay for his funeral. I was a penniless conscript. I purchased the coffin but I was not able to secure at the Chacarita Cemetery a grave in perpetuity. It meant that after 7 years my father’s remains would be disinterred and thrown away. I have no memory of the funeral.

My second death was that of my grandmother. She died in 1970. Rosemary got to meet her. A friend, Raúl Guerrero told me when I mentioned that I had no memory of the funeral, that both of us carried the coffin.

My third death was that of my mother who died in bed in 1972. Both Rosemary and I watched her breathe in and not out. The only doctor in our neighbourhood who was able to come to pronounce her dead was a veterinarian.

I made all the arrangements for her funeral and bought her coffin. Rosemary and I were so poor that her parents helped us. Again I have no memory of the funeral but I do remember that when I ordered her tombstone it read “sursum corda”. My mother often would say this to me when I was depressed. It is from the Latin Mass and it means “lift up your heart”.

What these three deaths in my family have in common, is that they were all buried. I  could go to Mexico and I would be able to locate my mother and my grandmother.

It is my Rosemary’s death on December 8, 2020 that changes the equation. It has left me troubled.

I watched her die and a few minutes before she did die she asked, “Am I dying?” I could not respond.

From my hanging chair in the living room I watched her shrouded body being removed by the funeral people. That was the last time I was aware of her corporeal existence.

Alexandra took her ashes and spread them in her garden in Lillooet. I understand fully her intention. Rosemary loved that garden.

But something about my old-fashioned beliefs has me grieving even though I know I would never go to a cemetery had she been buried in one.

Because Rosemary and I believed we would never see each other again, I find myself almost in delight to be alive as she is in my constant memory all day. An oblivion, a total one, will mean the end of all that.

And yes, H.G. I know where you are. I also know where Rosemary’s beloved cat Casi is. His ashes are here in my scan.

bufanda

Quizá del fr. ant. bouffante.

1. f. Prenda larga y estrecha, por lo común de lana o seda, con que se envuelve y abriga el cuello y la boca.

Two things came to my mind about 20 minutes before I sat down in my oficina to write this. I was thinking on my bed with Niño and Niña asleep on my side. One is that because I have so much spare time to think I sometimes remember Captain Beefheart who in his Ashtray Hearts lyric he has this : Somebody’s had too much to think.

Two:  Jorge Luís Borges famously wrote that in order to remember you have to first forget.

I had just returned from my daily walk with Niño around the block. I dress warmly but most important I wear a lovely and soft cashmere scarf that Rosemary gave me not too long ago.

Thinking about the scarf, suddenly in my memory, there was the word bufanda which is Spanish for scarf. I may not have used, or thought of that word, for many years. Yet there it was popping in my mind. How does that happen? I have no idea but the word made me think that I would go down to my office to write.

Rosemary had a penchant for scarves. Hers and mine are inside a metal hoop in our entrance closet. Every time I see them I grieve as I can remember which ones she wore when and where.

In this photograph which I took a few blocks from our house in Arboledas, Estado de México perhaps in 1973 with a young Alexandra touching the water in the pool designed by noted Mexican architect Luís Barragán in what was then called Los Bebederos, Rosemary is wearing a scarf. Alas I cannot remember it except that since our youngest daughter has that dress she might also have the scarf.

Meanwhile I will glory in accepting the I keep remembering what I forget in Borgesian style.

I often quote to friends what Spanish/Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés said at a lecture that Rosemary and I attended many years ago in Mexico City.

He said that when we read about history that we should be aware that objectivity is a subjective invention of man.

I think that this concept plays an important role in how we as individuals choose our music and our opinion on what makes some of it interesting and some not.

My thoughts on this started when I told my friend Art Bergmann that of all the songs he ever composed my favourite is an early one called Data Redux. The melody sounds like 21^st century new avant-garde music. He laughed it off yesterday when he and my friend Brian Stevenson were having coffee at the Contintental Café on Commercial Drive.

If there is one feature of the internet, Google in this century, is that if you know of a piece of music it can be found almost always on Youtube. Because of that I can place a link here to that amazing song.

 Data Redux -video

After listening to Data Redux (unfortunately on my phone and I somewhere I have the record with it) I thought of other music that I subjectively like.

First on my list is the trombone part in Ravel’s Bolero. In my 10^th grade at St. Edward’s High School we lived in a huge dormitory with a Gothic ceiling. Brother Rene Lenhard, C.S.C. was our man-in charge prefect. At night he would play classical music so that our cultural education would continue into the night.

 Ravel's Bolero - Trombone part

Because I bought records in my youth I still have Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. To me the other side Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory is far more exciting as it has his orchestration of God Save the King.

God Save the King - Beethoven

Another record in my collection is Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue played by his pal Oscar Levant. On the other side is the fabulous but rarely played Concerto in F.

Gershwin Concerto in F - Oscar Levant

Just about everybody is familiar with the works of Ástor Piazzolla. I have a preference for a most different Vayamos al diablo (Let’s go to the Devil).

Vayamos al diablo

It was through Early Music Vancouver concerts that I became addicted to listening to chaconnes. My favourite is by a lesser known baroque composer called Tarquinio Merula.

 Tarquinio Merula -Ciaccona - Giardino Armonico

In the late 60s when Rosemary and I had been married on Feb 8 1968 we would go to the movies in Mexico City where we had two options. If we went when the film was about to begin the seats were all taken and we had to be separated. If we went 50 minutes early we were subjected to government propaganda of the president cutting ribbons for opening hospitals. More often that not the background music was Aaron Copland's  El Salón México. It grew on me and it is one of my fave 20th century compostions. A couple of years ago I discovered on Youtube Leonard Bernstein introducing Copland on Copland's birthday and then Copland conducts (I believe in Carnegie Hall with a luxury of TV cameras) his El Salón México.

 El Salón México

I remember to this day when I was going around 16th Avenue and turned to Granville on my way home. I had a cassette of Pablo Casals conducting Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. My fave has always been the second because of the difficult trumpet part. When it began I thought there was something  wrong with my car's cassette player. The piece was being played so fast as if there were no tomorrow!

Bach Brandenburg No2 - Pablo Casals

I could go on but I must stop and only cite one more and that is my prized CD Money Jungle with Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus and Max Roach. I found out in this CD that Ellington was not only a great pianist but that he sounded a lot like Thelonious Monk before Thelonius Monk sounded like himself.

Money Jungle

Susy

 

I believe that I am an old fashioned romantic. In my 81 years, besides my wife Rosemary, I had two girlfriends. They were in Argentina. The one I am going to write about died of cancer in the late 80s. The other one is alive and well and lives in London.

If either of those two were to show up at my door I would be madly in love with them. I never experienced the concept of falling out of love.

Susy Bornstein was an Argentine woman of Austrian Jewish extraction. When I met her in 1966 and she did not show any repulsion at meeting with the nerd I surely was.  I was astounded.

As the relationship progressed I told her that there was a chap called Astor Piazzolla that was going to play in downtown Buenos Aires at the Teatro Florida on a coming Saturday. I added that I was fascinated by his term that he played Nuevo Tango.

She told me that we were invited to a party on that Saturday and that we could leave in time to go to the concert.

During the party I reminded Susy that we had to leave. She said, “Alex I am having fun. You go.” As I was waiting for my train on that late afternoon I was depressed. I rode the train feeling a melancholy that increased as I approached the cavernous Retiro train station. 

I arrived at the Teatro Florida and sat down on my numbered seat. The one to my right was empty. This was the first time I heard  Pizzolla live, so I was momentarily distracted. He then, with his group, began to play the loveliest composition called Milonga del angel. Suddenly I felt something on my right thigh. And then in my ear there was a whisper, “I had to come.”

If I was in love before, at that moment I was madly in love.

What happened after Susy said was purely my imagination. After the concert we left holding hands and Florida which has always been an exclusively pedestrian street meant that we were going to have a nice walk. Across the street there was a kitchen appliance store. Susy pointed at an avocado coloured fridge and said, “That would look nice in our kitchen.” You can imagine my shock at of being offered marriage by the lovely apparition that Susy was.

A few months later she called me and said, “Alex I never want to see you again. You are uncultured and you will never amount to anything. I am leaving you for a violinist at the Teatro Colón Philharmonic. Goodbye.”

Somehow around 1987 I found her address in Buenos Aires. I visited my native city. I rang the bell. She opened it and said,  “Alex aren’t you going to kiss me?”     

She died a few months later. 

 Milonga del ángel - Ástor Piazzolla         

With Rebecca - 31 July 2020

 Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (RAE)

 Del lat. imaginatio, -ōnis.

1. f. Facultad del alma que representa las imágenes de las cosas reales o ideales.

The Spanish dictionary definition of imagination is lovely. I translate that to:  A potential of the soul that represents real or ideal things.

I had a thought while walking with Niño today. It was a lovely sunny day. I always think of Rosemary as I take the same route around the block that she did with him.

This thought was inspired by a CBC Ideas program I heard last year about St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, who is one of two Roman Catholic philosophers (the other is St. Thomas Aquinas).

It seems that St. Augustine wrote a startling opinion about music (obviously he was not aware of atonal music) in which he said that you listen to a note in a piece of music in the past, you then hear it in the present but then (important) you can predict the next note in the future.

For me this is an interesting modification of that linear 1, 2, 3.

In the back alley as I sensed the presence of Rosemary ( I do not believe in ghosts) I had what seemed to me a startling thought.

All day I remember Rosemary in my memory and these remembrances are all in the past. I cannot make them go away so I am in a permanent state of melancholy.

But what if my sensing Rosemary in that back alley is something from my imagination? 

In my magazine photography and writer past I remember imagining an idea and then going to pitch the story to the editor, and month later my imagination was rewarded with the reality of a printed cover article.

Imagination is not all a memory of the past. I am imagining the presence of Rosemary now. Can somehow that vision in my mind, while lacking a material presence, be still a real presence?

What would St. Augustine say?