Found I

Found II

Extreme old age affects me in that I am trying to put order into my chaotic life. I am busy finding stuff and when it is photographic I file it away. I will not care what happens to all of it once I am gone.

I ran into a friend from the Vancouver Sun (one of the last journalists) who is urging me to donate my negatives, slides and photographs to the Vancouver Archive. I told them that most archives are where photographs and documents go to die.

If nobody is interested in my stuff while I am alive why should I care when I am in oblivion?

 These panoramics of our Kerrisdale corner garden on Athlone Street, I took with my German swivel lens panoramic camera, a Noblex.

At the very least with that garden my Rosemary made me a good gardener like she was and I developed a liking for Greek and Latin botanical nomenclature. The garden was so spectacular that it appeared in several gardening magazines including Better Homes and Gardens. Bus loads of Americans would come to see it.

Like my Rosemary that garden is gone. It has become a bittersweet  memory of what perfection can be in what I now believe is a mediocre Vancouver that is culturally sterile.

It was in 1969 that I took my first nudes. These involved my wife Rosemary (we had been married a year and a half ) and a few with our first daughter Alexandra.

La Primera Vez 

Rosemary and Alexandra

We moved to Vancouver in 1975 and by 1977 I found myself going to Vancouver’s clothing optional  Wreck Beach. My Rosemary told me I was wasting my time and that I could do more useful stuff. I did not know then that when I would first meet animator Marv Newland there, that the man would influence me in many ways.

It was at wreck where I started taking nudes using my Asahi Pentax S-3 with experimental Kodak Film like SO-115 and S0-4. The women did no object to me taking their photographs. There was one quiet lovely woman called April. My roll of Kodak Black and White Infrared Film were my first Vancouver nudes. I did not quite know what I was doing but there was one single shot that set me on my course of becoming a good photographer. What made the photograph special for me is that I left the black sand on the soles of her feet. I believe that a “perfect” photograph can be uninteresting. It is the flaw that draws in the eyes.

My photographs of April (there are many as I even photographed her at her home) I had filed inside a thick file called Wreck Beach. A few weeks ago when I went to look for the photograph, the negatives and the contact sheet they were gone!

I was extremely upset even though I had two very good darkroom 8x10s.

Then when I was to photograph a friend with my Mamiya RB-67 camera with a lens cap pinhole I looked at photographs I had taken 20 years ago. And there were the negatives and contact sheet.      

There is a humorous addition to the story. Some years ago I was with Rosemary at Safeway during Christmas. I told her, “Rosemary doesn’t it feel like April?” I repeated that a few times. A nearby woman faced me and said, “So my name is April, so what?” I regret that I did not get her phone number or enquire about her last name. At Wreck Beach nobody ever divulged their last name.

It pains me now that in this 21^st century I cannot show to anybody my lovely Wreck Beach nudes.  

New Year’s Eve in Vancouver this 2024, was a letdown. Increasingly this city is becoming sterile. It has no flavour. I fell asleep at 12:05 after I heard about 5 puny firecrackers.

My idea of a wonderful New Year’s was the first I had with my Rosemary in Veracruz on December 31 1967.

I had met her about two weeks before, so I had taken her to show her off to my mother who was a school teacher (a one room school house in her house). Her students were the children of the engineers and employees of Alcan.

Rosemary immediately had a problem coping with the heat and humidity of Veracruz so she took many showers and sometimes she would yell to tell me that there were flying cockroaches in the bathroom.

Since we were not yet married my mother gave us separate rooms. I checked the doors. One squeaked so I oiled it. I believe that since our fist daughter was born 9 months later I can guess how it happened.

Both Rosemary and I noticed that in comparison to the 73250 ft altitude of Mexico City, sea level in Veracruz carried sound better. Sounds were louder. We would go to the lovely café La Parroquia which was in the Zócalo kitty corner with the main church. We would sit under the outside portales and marimba groups would play. With a little tip I could coax the players to sing a song on the spot that would contain the name of Rosemary and that she was a blonde.In the record scanned here, a record of my mother's that was recorded in 1940 it contains a honest and authentic La Bamba where each member of the group (they all have different voices) they all sing extemporaneously and make up the words as they sing.

La Bamba - Andrés Huesca

The old trams would pass by and the noise of their clanging added to the charms of the port city of Veracruz.

But it was on New Year’s Eve at the stroke of midnight that all the ships of the port, in unison would play their sirens.

These sounds are the sounds of a real New Year’s Eve, my first with that blonde called Rosemary.

Scanned 31 December 2024

 

My Manila-born grandmother, Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena, was born in the 19th century and was educated in Valencia, Spain. By some lucky quirk my Abuelita met my wife Rosemary in 1970 before she died.

My Abuelita  or Abue as I called her, was ahead of her time and she educated me as my mother was a busy teacher trying to make ends meet in Buenos Aires and then in Mexico City. Abuelita would not say, “Alex, don’t do that.” She would say, “Alex if you do this this is what is going to happen…”

Because of her Spanish education Rosemary and I adopted many of her customs. One of them was a 19^th century Spanish custom of eating 12 grapes in the 12 seconds when our mantel clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.

This year I have decided to keep the custom. But I will eat 24 grapes. The extra 12 are in memory of my Rosemary.

Rosemary and I would go shopping for nice grapes on the 31st. I bought grapes a few days ago and I thought they will do even if they are not of the perfection that would have delighted Rosemary.

Cynics would say that it was far easier to drink a glass of wine. In the scan here there are 24 grapes even if you cannot see them.

Rosemary Waterhouse-Hayward

Corina Poore

Susy Bornstein

Vivir consiste en construir futuros recuerdos- El Túnel de Ernesto Sabato

Living consists in building future remembrances.

Today I went with Hilary to see the just-released film about Bob Dylan – The Complete Unknown. After this fine film I was driving Hilary home and I immediately knew that I would write this.

Musically I have always been an idiot. When my Lomas High School Students in Mexico City asked me if I like Alice Copper I replied,”No, who’s she?” Ditto when a connoisseur friend asked me about Carmina Burana.

I was saved from musical perdition by 3 women.

The first, Corina Poore my first real girlfriend in Buenos Aires in 1966 who was not Argentine because she was born in Uruguay introduced me to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary by singing their songs with her fine voice and guitar playing. I had no idea of what folk music was all about.

The second woman was my second girlfriend. Susy Bornstein was Argentine. She said I was culturally impaired. She took me to the Teatro Colón to see my first operas. One was The Fiery Angel by Prokofiev and the other Orpheus ed Euridice by Gluck. Then she forced me to go to see a film called Help!. To this day that is my fave Beatles song.

The reason I was so musically impaired was that I had adopted a liking for jazz before I met these women. I liked Miles Davis,Dave Brubeck,Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.

Back in Mexico in 1967 I met Rosemary who introduced me to her likes. By the time we were living in Arboledas, Estado de México she liked for me to play Tapestry by Carole King and she thought            Donovan was lovely. If I played any Piazzolla she would leave to her room as she knew that Piazzolla would remind me of Argentina and my two former girlfriends.

She did like Peter, Paul and Mary but I never did confide that Mary’s straight blonde hair and bangs reminded me of her.

As I watched the film with Hilary the thoughts of those former women of my life coincided with Ernesto Sábato’s quote on memory.

Driving Hilary to Burnaby on Lougheed Highway, means I pass by the corner of Springer Avenue, where we lived when we moved to Vancouver. I try not to look but I can sense it and memories pour in.

I would modify Sábato’s sentence to:

Living in the present consists in building future memories from our past.