There is an expression I like to use that  connects to being behind the camera. It is, “Who shaves the barber?”

Of late in this pandemic my Rosemary and I have have been spending a lot of time on or in bed. We read the newspapers, check CNN in our phones and I try to tackle the novel that will represent for me this year, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela.

I wrote about my Rosemary’s 9 beds here but I had not been able to find a picture of her on any of those beds. I know I took pictures in the Kerrisdale (Athlone) bed of Rosemary tutoring our youngest daughter Hilary or her two daughters Lauren and Rebecca (all on math) but I have not been able to find them.

In pile of snapshots and negatives that I am sorting that are all in our dining room I found the one used to illustrate this blog. Thanks to my 17-year-old Photoshop I was able to salvage some detail from the terrible print. The photograph is of the both of us (I have no memory who shot it) in our Athlone bed and you can note that the bed has no headboard.

But on our first night on that bed in 1986 I remember being able to look out and see how beautiful our neighbourhood was.

I can remember when we first held hands. How electric it was! Somehow the first kiss is not there in my head. After 52 years of marriage I can report that while some might think that in most marriages passion subsides with time, I can correct that assumption by pointing out that, somehow, love for me, does not diminish into affection but quite the opposite. It becomes a lovely (the correct adjective) affection in which holding hands or a kiss on the cheek is exquisite. And this we do a lot now. And from my mother I have kept the tradition of smelling Rosemary behind the ears.