Enjoy!
Saturday, December 27, 2025
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”.
A Yuletide Memory Postponed
Friday, December 26, 2025
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 19th
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.
That Epiphany after Christmas Day
Thursday, December 25, 2025
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.
Overcooked but Enjoyed
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
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 - January 31, 1928 - December 23 - 2025
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
 | | 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
Two Paragons of Stability
Monday, December 22, 2025
 | | 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.
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