My grandmother often told me, “La ignorancia is atrevida,” [ignorance is daring] when some politician or friend had done something stupid. I apply that to myself, frequently.

I have had on my bed table a little black button in my possession now for a couple of years. I got it at an Art Bergmann concert. He had the buttons made because that was the title of one of his recent albums.

Some many years ago Vancouver Magazine rock column writer Les Wiseman and I went to New York City. One of the places Wiseman insisted on going to was the Algonquin. We sat in a little table and because when the joint became famous it was prohibition, patrons drank water so did we. Over us was a dark spot on the ceiling where the chandelier that was over the famous Algqonquin Round Table must have been.

Somehow I decided in the last few days to look up the the origin of question in Bergmann’s button. You can believe how astounded I was to find out it had been uttered by Dorothy Parker!

Because of my advanced age of 84 I have increasing problems with memory and particularly with names. I find myself using tricks to remember them. For a while I could not remember the name of a Canadian singer I had photographed. My trick was to remember Leonard Bernstein and that then pointed to Leonard Cohen.

To remember that leading woman (I would never use the word lady as only women can use it) I think of a Vancouver friend called Dorothy Barkley and then I connect to Parker Pen.

I try not to read the news these days as Parker’s question applies more than ever.

And obviously Art Bergmann is a man of culture.

There is a framed portrait of my Rosemary on the opposite wall from my bed. Rarely did I ever take portraits of my family with them smiling. I asked them to stare into my camera which was always at their eye level. The result is that Rosemary in this portrait that I took in Mexico City in 1969 stares at me. As soon as I turn off the lights in the evening she keeps staring at me.

I took this self-portrait because I had a memory that has haunted me since I was 6. The upcoming Halloween is part of it.

When I was 6 in Buenos Aires my mother worked for the American School that was right next to the Belgrano-R train station. She had friends in the American Embassy and often brought American foods that charmed me. It was on that important day (it must have been close to Halloween in the US when she showed me a package of multi-coloured candy she told me was called candy corn. She offered me a handful. They were delicious. I wanted more. She told me no and I watched her open an armoire and place the bag in it. She went to the kitchen. I immediately opened the armoire and helped myself to more candy. But there was a mirror behind one of the doors. I saw myself and I mentally told myself, “That is me.” I believe that in that moment I became who I am and to this day while I am all that much older that is still me.

Borges once wrote that every first occasion is followed by an infinite repetition of it until we die.

And so when I took the picture illustrating this blog I quickly saw myself as a little blond boy who found his way into his existence. There is another thought in my mind when I look at myself in a mirror. Borges wrote, “Is this the last time this mirror will reflect my face?”

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad ' 1 October 2026

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 28 September 2026 (earlier version of the one above)

A couple of days ago on September 28 I scanned a lovely bloom of my English Rose, Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’. It is one of my best roses and it also is great fall bloomer. After I scan my roses I put them into little vases and put them on my dining room credenza. Today when I returned from a day’s drive showing my San Francisco friend Jorge Urréchega I noticed the single bloom. I saw in it past due look a beauty that my friends from the Vancouver Rose Society would not accept. For them roses have to be at their perfection peak.

As an 84-year old man who is obsolete, redundant, retired and inconsequential, am I past my peak?

I believe that I am an artist and that I have to keep doing my stuff and only stop when that definitive end of my efforts will be my death.

While the old rose in the vase is not growing, it is slowly going in a similar direction as that of the man who cut it from its life-giving shrub. For me the transformation is a thing of beauty.

I feel the same of my Asahi Pentax S-3 I bought used in 1962 at Foto Rudiger in Mexico City. Even by then the black enamel had rubbed off to expose its brass body.

One of nomenclature changes in photography in this century that I abhor, is that photographers do not call their cameras, cameras. They might ask a new friend, “What kind of gear do you own?” These newish photographers see their pristine cameras as museum pieces which the coddle but do not seem to used them for what they were intended which is to take photographs. A term for these photographers is – gear heads.

There is a tidy purpose in a camera that looks like it has been used (an my Asahi Pentax indeed has been used and I keep using it) that favourably compares with my scan of the spent rose.

Roberto Baschetti - Buenos Aires Zoo

April 8, 1966 is a date that is permanent in my memory. I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy. Even though it was a fall it was a hot fall. I was wearing my winter wool uniform. I was hot. I was reading the April 8 Time Magazine that had on its cover in bold letters – Is God Dead? I was sitting in front of the tiger cage in the Buenos Aires Zoo.

I was still and ignorant young man on Argentine literature so I did not know that a frequent writer, who adored tigers, Jorge Luís Borges often sat on that same bench.

My two years of studying philosophy in Mexico City College (I wanted to be an engineer but failed electricity) with Ramón Xirau had yet to filter itself into my brain. It was only years that after having been taught from its beginnings with the Pre-Socratics all the way to Sartre, that I became a Platonist and a Hegelian.

Now I would say that Time should have followed with a cover – Is Philosophy Dead?

All the above comes to mind when try to explain my situation to anybody, a sad one of missing a wife I was married to for 52 years.

I write a blog (7061), scan my plants (at least 3000 of them), take photographs with film and digital, feed myself and my female cat Niña and see my youngest daughter once a week.

The phone never rings. Most of the people I have known, that are still alive, do not have dementia or terrible diseases never call me. Perhaps, because they live with someone, I have begun to see my clingy Niña almost as a person. I often ask her, “Do you remember Rosemary?”

People tell me to make friends, to become more active and read more books. They are unaware what philosophic angst is all about. My grandmother would often tell me in Spanish, “Vamos a filosofar,” or “Let’s philosophize.

My Platonism makes me believe that Niña has in her an essence of catness and that in her genes she has the memory of ancient cats being stroked by pharaohs.

When I first read this poem I smiled at the deep philosophic thought is such a short poem.

Resumé

By Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

I long to find someone who will not react with thought stoppers, “Alex, meet more people and look for more activities.” And also someone who would say, “Alex let’s philosophize.”

Hilary

As I prepare for my soon-to-happen-oblivion I have been trying to get rid of stuff. Today I put 25 wire coat hangers in my recycle box. When I was scanning my plants for a blog I found this photograph of Hilary (my youngest daughter who is now 55) in my office desk drawer. How could I not smile when I looked at it? Because it was so long ago I note that my handwriting was still legible.

I cannot convince any of my friends the pleasure of filing family photographs, negatives and slides. I have two exterior hard drives where I have my Family I and Family II files. When I discover pictures like this one of Hilary I save the scan to Family II.

It is a cliché that our past is rosy. But just looking at this  photograph I immediately think that we lived on Springer Avenue in Burnaby and that Rosemary had chosen that our daughters go to Mallardville to learn French. Life was simple, yes, but I tend to forget that it was tough looking for paying work as a photographer.

We were happy in our little strata title little home with a miniscule front garden. We began to live in it as soon as we arrived from Mexico City in 1975. By  1986 Rosemary in her wisdom moved us to a splendid home with a large corner garden in Kerrisdale.

She died on December 9, 2020. Every day of my life I thank her for that rosy past and a future in which all I have to worry about is how to get rid of wire coat hangers.

Looking back it is easy to believe in fate. When I finished my conscription in the Argentine Navy in 1967 I was repatriated on a WWII Victory Ship, Río Aguapey to Veracruz where my mother lived. Many years later I discovered that the ship (both Liberty and Victory ships were the concept of quick one week production of Edgar Kaiser) had been built at the Burrard Shipyards in North Vancouver.

In 1958 my mother put me into a Roman Catholic boarding school St. Eward’s High School in Austin, Texas. I was a mother’s boy and I quickly became home sick. My mother came to Austin to help. She took me to see a film at the Varsity on Congress Avenue. The film was Raintree County with Elizabeth Taylor, Eva Marie Saint and Montgomery Clift. I fell hard for Saint and simply ignored Taylor’s role in the film.

I wonder if that led me to one day, on December 15, 1967 in Mexico City to spot a woman from the back with long blond straight hair, a dark blue miniskirt and with legs as beautiful as my mother’s. I have no recollection if I tapped her on her shoulder. We were married on February 8, 1968.