1951 - Susan Stone right, Alex left with gun

Rosemary & Niño - 3 March 2020

When I was 8 I was interested in girls without knowing exactly why. There was a girl in school I especially liked called Susan Stone. Her father was the general manager of General Motors Argentina. He would send a Cadillac to pick me up to take me to their spacious mansion so that I could play with his daughter. It was there where I saw my first television set.

At night I would turn off my lights with the intention of thinking about Susan. Since the idea of sex or anything related to a woman was not in my imagination my thoughts involved nebulous ideas of sitting next to her and watching her smile at me.

Now if you get into bed with the idea of thinking about someone (I do this daily in relation to my Rosemary) what is it called? It cannot be a daydream? Thoughts that come to your head as you are about to sleep what are they called?

My Rosemary often told me that I lived in the past. Consider being a man in a family and you are an engineer and not a photographer. What are your memories? Borges often said that in order to remember you have to first forget.

In my case I am surrounded by framed portraits of my family and of my past life. I have thousands of negatives and slides of all that. I am constantly finding negatives of Rosemary and our daughters that I have almost no memory of having taken. When I see these what do you call what you might remember about them?

As I see it I have memories (memories that I can urge myself to go back to) and I have the memories of looking at photographs and remembering (or not) when I took them and the circumstances.

The term photographic memory is used to signify a very good memory.  Somehow I have another version of this that I would also call a photographic memory.

How does this photographic memory of mine affect my daily life?

I turn off the light. The cats get close to me. I notice the empty spot on my right on the bed. I don’t have to force myself to remember how it was when Rosemary was alive and there. I can remember that she never snored and slept with her back to me. I can reveal that all I had to do was to touch her back and she would know what it was that wanted and she would pull up her nightie. I can remember that a few months before she died I would also turn my back to her and I would cry (doing my best, but failing, that she would not hear me).

As her death on December 9 2020 recedes, ever so slightly from my memory, I can remember her voice well.

But I want to end this by asking myself that when I turn off the lights and immediately begin to think of her, what is this kind of memory called? Is it any different from turning off the lights, so many years ago, to think about Susan Stone?

Memories happen without control. But what of memories that one pushes to remember? Is there a difference with a random memory and one that comes from looking at a photograph that I took that is on my bedroom wall?

It would seem that the concept of memory is complex.