NYTimes Link 01

NYTimes Link 02 
 

In my life I have noticed that I live one full of patterns. It was sometime around 28 years ago when I told my friend Mark Budgen that on Sundays I would go to a store (like Budgen, the store is gone) on Broadway almost with Granville to buy my Sunday New York Times. Budgen told me that the Globe and Mail distributed a daily delivered NY Times to the door.

That began the pattern of Rosemary and I having a daily breakfast in bed with the NYTimes. After Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 I continued with this traditional pattern. I have breakfast in bed with the NYTimes and the Vancouver Sun in the company of my two cats, Niño and Niña.

I can assert that having read the NYTimes all these years has been a cheap education in spite of the fact that I now pay about $1700 a year. There is one terrific highlight to all of this. The Sunday edition of the paper arrives promptly around 9PM on Saturday.

In these last years, reading the NYTimes does not take as long as it used to. I avoid reading about the shenanigans (you know where). One of the advantages of my subscription is that I can gift 10 articles per month. If I send the pay-wall free link by email to my friends they are able to re-send them with no problem. Of course we all know that in Canada we cannot put links to newspapers in social media. That does not stop me from putting these two very positive and happy links in my blog.

As I first heard from a waiter at a Keg restaurant around 1977, “Enjoy”.

Moving with Rosemary to our Kitsilano dúplex 7 years coincided with the introduction in Vancouver of Camellia sasanqua ‘Yuletide’. What was and is special of this plant is that it has bright red flowers that bloom around Christmas. It was my job to find one that was about to bloom mid-December. I would go to all the local nurseries. I succeeded but there was one problem. Somehow the plant would not survive from one year to the next. This meant that Rosemary would strongly coax me to go and find one.

This 2025 is the second year that my Camellia has survived. But I am a bit saddened by the fact that while it has small buds it will not bloom until mid-January. Rosemary would have been upset.

I am upset, too as the plant; outside my door blooming, would have made me smile knowing that Rosemary would have been happy.

Few might know how camellias are especially important to mankind. It is the Chinese camellia, Camellia sinensis from where we get both black and green tea. English 19^th century planstman Robert Fortune, dressed (two stories) as a woman or a Chinese potentate and had himself taken in a covered sedan chair where he observed how the camellia was grown, how the leaves were picked and how the leaves were aged to make tea. He then smuggled some plants and took them to Ceylon. This explains how tea got to India and from there to England.

As a little boy in Buenos Aires the days between Christmas and the Epiphany (Three Wise Kings Day) was an eternity of waiting. Christmas gifts were the useful ones like socks but on El Día de los Tres Reyes Magos when we would place our shoes outside our room the night before, we would find toys.

There was no Argentine child that could not remember Melchor, Gaspar and Baltazar. It was Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. at his St. Edward’s High School religion class that gave me a new look at the significance of the three wise men.

He told us that in the Old Testament, God had made an arrangement with the Israelites in which if they obeyed His Ten Commandments they would go to heaven, while heathens, if good heathens were destined to a place called limbo. When the three wise men showed up at the manger this was a most important event as it signalled the beginning of the New Testament in which non-Israelites could also ascend to heaven. I was amazed because Brother Edwin told us that what the three wise men had in common was that because they were not Israelites they were uncircumcised.

That is most important for me. Some years ago in Mexico City my friend Raúl Guerrero Montemayor had a visiting friend Nonong Quezon, whose father had been president of the Philippines. We went swimming. At the shower room Quezon pointed at me(down there) and said, “Andong, you are suput.”

Yes, (Suput) is my nickname now and it means uncircumcised in Tagalog.

Echoes of Past Christmases

Echoes of Christmas - George Feyer on Piano 

Yma Sumac - sings 

Memory can be a surprising element in my life. It is unpredictable but satisfying when it happens.

My mother, my grandmother and I arrived in Mexico City in 1953. We rented a furnished house in an area of the city that was called Tecamachalco. It had a strange console that was new to me. It had a record player and I read, “High Fidelity”. I remember (I was 11) playing a record that featured the outstanding voice of a Peruvian woman called Yma Sumac. I also remember that a man offering his services to repair our shoes outside, showed up one day. He kept on doing that until we left Mexico City in 1975 for Vancouver.

There is a record that I have that is in perfect condition that I will play in tonight’s Christmas Eve dinner. My mother must have bought soon after we settled in the Tecamachalco home. It is called Echoes of Christmas and it features the piano of Hungarian George Feyer. She also bought another of his records called Echoes of Spain which also plays with no scratches on my linear tracking Sony turntable. Part of the Christmas music package is that I always play John Denver and the Muppets. I have a good sound system so I can play my CDs.

And since I am writing this December 26 and will place it back on the hole, December 24, I can report that Christmas dinner was a success even though I over-cooked the roast beef. The Yorkshire Pudding was perfect and the company, daughters Alexandra  and Hilary, granddaughter Lauren and partner Nick, granddaughter Rebecca, my Portland friend Curtis Daily (who helped with the cooking, and Monique a friend that Alexandra brought.

Niño and Niña enjoyed the cut-up-into-little-pieces roast beef even though it was overcooked.

Gathie Falk - March 2004

In my obsession to tell people that I am waiting to die because I am 83 years old, many tell me that I am healthy and that my brain seems to be in working order. They add that I may have a few more years before I hit my oblivion.

One of the negative aspects of my longevity is that I have only two relatives over 83 who are alive. One is 91 and his sister is 90. Under my age, except for one or two writers I may have worked with in my past they, friends and relatives are all  mostly dead.

Before I became busy with Vancouver Magazine in the late 70s I would go to Wreck Beach. My Rosemary kept telling me I was wasting my time. It was on Wreck Beach they I met my very good friend (to this day and he is alive) classic animator Marv Newland.

When I found out today that artist Gathie Falk died I instantly remembered meeting her at Wreck Beach and how we talked about art.

I photographed her on March 2004 for the Georgia Straight. In those years journalism was alive in Vancouver. Both the Straight and the Vancouver Sun covered the arts well. That is now gone.

The one time I saw a work of art by Falk was in the unlikely office of a logging baron. I wrote about it here.

The Uncommon Jake Kerr 

Niño and Niña

It has been often that I have written of the importance of stability in my life. Paradoxically, since Rosemary’s financial acumen made it possible for me to now live without any worries that I find myself with an unstable existential angst. In Spanish that translates to the nice word ‘enajenado’. It almost translates to “someone-elsed”.

There were three pillars of stability in my life in Vancouver. Two were my men friends Sean Rossiter and Mark Budgen, the third was my Rosemary.

There were two other men who were paragons of stability. Malcolm Parry was the editor of Vancouver Magazine and Charles Campbell of the Georgia Straight. Both kept their office doors open. I would enter with story ideas and they would invariably say, “Do it.” That is all gone and I live in an unpredictable world to which I find myself saying to myself what my friend Abraham Rogatnick told me three months before he died, “Alex, I am not long for  this world. I am glad.”

Some of all the above that troubles me has been a tad lessened since I returned from my five day trip to Mexico City. I wrote about, see below.

Pedro Meyer  - An Active Photographer at 91 

And there is something else that has given me an impetus to keep on. My brother and sister cats, Niño and Niña are stable and predictable in many ways. They cling to me and give me a warmth that reminds of Rosemary’s. Niño, in particular stares at me. I suspect he is telling me, “Alex don’t die before we do. If not, who is going to take care of us?”

My two daughters visit me especially when my older one, comes to town from her home in Lillooet. Hilary, who lives in Burnaby, calls me almost every day. Every week and a half she may come to my house, I will feed her and then we will go to a good film at the Fifth Avenue Cinema. But this is not enough. It is the constant presence of my cats that is important. It is coming home from shopping that I think, "Niño and Niña will be waiting for me."

Rosemary was a constant presence in my life. My cats give me some of that.