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.