Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena , Antonio, Dolores, and right, my mother Filomena - November 1919

In these last few weeks I have been having a thought that my memory has to be classified.

Because my mother, father and grandmother never lived in Vancouver there is nothing in the city that may have memories of them. There are some exceptions:

When my grandmother, and her three children, my mother, uncle and aunt, left Manila in 1919 (after my grandfather had died at age 30 the year before) to live in the Bronx, they left in a Japanese ship.  They disembarked in a place that my grandmother told me when I was a child, “It had mountains and trees and it was called Van-coooo- ver.” She then added, “We left from a cavernous train station for Montreal.”

Because the train station was the Canadian Pacific Train Station, I often go and imagine my family walking across.

Is that a different memory because it has a physical place? Is my father’s large 30s Argentine flag, folded here in my oficina another example of memory because of an object associated with the person?

In my Kitsilano home, every room, every picture on the wall, is a physical manifestation of my Rosemary. Our two cats are her in a way.

And so I now see memory as being one of physical substance and one of just a remembrance from a past. I can still remember the voices of my father, mother, grandmother and Rosemary. Is that aural memory? How about scent memory? 

My looking into information on memory took me to Google where I put: Jorge Luís Borges, Memoria.

The result was an over-the-top rabbit hole – La Memoria de Shakespeare. This was a book containing a story with that title in 1985. Since almost anything by Borges is now available, all complete, I was able to read the story about a man who has a talent of having the whole memory of William Shakespeare and who is able to bestow the talent to anybody only at the personal loss of it. This he does to a man who becomes the narrator of the story. Within that story I found this:

 My way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf.

I looked up the quote and found this:

This famous quote is from William Shakespeare's play Macbeth and is spoken by Macbeth in Act 5, Scene 3. It is a metaphor for his life, which he feels has withered and lost its meaning, much like a leaf in late autumn. He is weary of life and sees no joy, honor, or love in his future because of his wicked deeds.

While I am not to admit having made wicked deeds I do feel an emptiness that the life I have lead is past me and I am just waiting to make my exit. And this especially so with that quote ending with "the yellow leaf" of the fall I am experiencing right now.

Karethe Linaae

Liv Ullmann - July 1990

Karethe was a friend who lived quite a few years ago in Vancouver and was involved in the film industry. She would come to our weekly Thursdays at the Railway Club for lunch. We had a friendly group of writers, artists, photographers, poets and many lovely women who were edcysiasts. Whenever anybody would see me with Karethe they would invariably ask me, “Who is she?” She had that kind of presence. She now lives in Ronda in Spain. I would do anything to photograph her again.

Periodically in my ocio (a Spanish word that is a tad more negative than leisure as an ocioso is just a plain lazy person) I look at my extensive files. Today I made the connection that in my 83 years of existence I have only photographed two persons who were Norwegian. Karethe and Liv Ullman.

My favourite photograph of Ullmann is the one at the bottom right. That meant it was my third exposure of a total of 8 with my medium format RB-67. When I faced her she told me, "Alex don't ask me to smile." 

Whenever I look up her files at first I cannot find them. The reason is that I have two separate two-file drawers for writers. Before I photographed her I read her excellent autobiography Changes. She wrote a second one years later called Choices.

And because my author files are in alphabetical order she is between Mario Vargas Llosa and Vancouver poet Michael Turner. 

Hydrangea macrophylla , floret bottom right - 12 October 2025

Thanks to Google I was able to find out why hydrangeas are called hortensias in Spanish.

The Spanish name "hortensia" for hydrangea comes from the Latin word "hortus," meaning "garden," and was given to honor the French astronomer Nicole-Reine Hortense Lepaute. While the botanical name Hydrangea was based on its Greek roots (meaning "water vessel"), the French botanist Philibert Commerson used the Latinized French name Hortense in 1771 to create the alternative name, Hortensia.

 Not so common now in this century is the fine female name of Hortensia. I knew a few in Mexico.

 As so many of my plants are waning in this fall some of my hydrangeas have yet to give up the ghost. Today I decided to scan a Hydrangea macrophylla so I can instruct anybody interested in that the individual little flowers within that mophead are called florets. Rosemary pointed that out to me years ago and I have not forgotten.

 I associate Rosemary’s insistence in calling plants by their correct name by the quote from Through a Looking Glass where Humpty Dumpty tells Alice:

 "When I use a word... it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less". Alice questions him, but Humpty Dumpty asserts his authority, declaring, "The question is, which is to be master—that's all".

I may have at the very least 3000 plants scans since I began in the summer of 2001. I fuss a bit more but I must add that I am always surprised at the beauty (not always expected) of my scans like this one.  I play around with my 22 year-year-old Photoshop 8 to balance how much shadow detail I want to include. I have not lost my enthusiasm and think that this scan is lovely. I avoid using that now hackneyed word “stunning”.