I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Joan Didion

It has been impossible for me to escape the loss of my Rosemary who died 6 years ago. Because her cat Niña, now that her twin brother died in May, she has adopted me and clings to me all the time. This provides me with an almost guilt-free excuse to lie clothed on my bed with her and do nothing.

It is not doing nothing exactly as I am suffering a malady right out of Captain Beefheart’s Ashtray Heart lyric – Someone’s had too much to think. I do this lots.

After Rosemary died I read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking which she began to write the morning after her husband died at the dinner table. In the book she writes that she took John Gregory Dunn’s clothes to a store but could not take his shoes as she thought he might just come back and need them.

In my closet I have all of Rosemary’s shoes. I have an affinity for her shoes because we always went shopping together for her shoes and she often bought that ones I suggested. The shoe in the scan here we bought in a shoe store on Avenida Florida in Buenos Aires.

I have now written 7085 blogs and few of the ones since December 9, 2020 do not mention Rosemary and my melancholy. But Didion’s statement here is always in my mind. I am no Didion but I may have inherited a little from my father who was a journalist and my mother who was a poet. Sitting down here in my oficina to write this is a bit comforting as sharing my feelings of Rosemary somehow connect me to the woman she was.

After two years of studying philosophy under Ramón Xirau in Mexico City in 1962/63 I became a Platonist. I disagree with Plato who said humans could perceive perfection but not actually see it or experience it.

My technique to take my portraits, especially my family portraits (many of them framed and on the walls of my home) was to always put my camera at eye level. I rarely used a telephoto lens opting for a 35mm or 50mm which placed me close to my subject. I never asked them to smile and they looked straight into the lens.

When you see these portraits and the one here of Rosemary I believe I can plunge into their soul and perceive some of their spirit. To me that is perfection.

The photograph here of Rosemary I took in 1969. It is framed and on the opposite wall from my bed. She stares at me and keeps at it when I turn off the lights. I never asked her why she had this sad look on her eyes even when she might have had a tiny smile.

I will never know.