Richard Chamberlain - April 1998

 

George Richard Chamberlain (March 31, 1934 – March 29, 2025) – Wikipedia

I don’t believe I am an ambulance chaser by writing about Richard Chamberlain on the day he died. I have written about Chamberlain twice.

Grasshopper Hill - Tchaikovsky & Richard Chamberlain

Richard Chamberlain & Diana the Huntress

I want to write about him today because at my age of 82 I have no idea when oblivion will take me away. As people (friends, relatives) older than I am or even younger die almost every day I cannot escape my fate with distractions.

I remember when I was teaching at a local arts/photography school called VanArts where I was not a happy camper. My students were allowed to eat in class and they had their laptops open during my lectures and they did the homework for other classes. One day when I mentioned that if they wanted to be photographers they might want to have a Plan B (plumbing) and a Plan C (electrician). I was fired soon after.

There was a Uk student called Strand who one day asked in class, “Mr. Hayward can you show us photographs of people that you have photographed that are still alive that appeared in magazines that still exist?”

My guess is that was the beginning of what is rampant now in social media – rudeness.

In the blog links above you will find out how a Chamberlain film directly affected Rosemary and me!

I am enclosing what in that last century we would call tear sheets. We would place them in our portfolio, proving to newspaper and magazine art directors that we were qualified editorial photographers. I am enclosing the tear sheet for two reasons. One is that I worked with a wonderful Globe arts reporter called Christopher Dafoe. And second that the folks at the Globe and Mail art department liked my filed edge border. Then it meant that I did not crop in my darkroom but in my camera. It assured those viewing that photograph that I had printed it as no two filed edge negative carriers were ever the same. It was like a finger print.

Rosemary with Camellia 'Donation' & Rosa 'Queen of Sweden' - 29 March 2025

The Grace—Myself—might not obtain – Emily Dickinson

707

The Grace—Myself—might not obtain—

Confer upon My flower—

Refracted but a Countenance—

For I—inhabit Her—

All these years since I began blogging in 2006 (6365 to date), I have found it rewarding to combine my photographs with poems by such poets as Emily Dickinson, Jorge Luís Borges, Julio Cortázar and many others. Without really being aware I have remembered many of these poems when I see them in my books. This is important to me as poetry was not my forte in high school. I could never memorize a poem for those extra points given. Now I remember lines from them.

In today’s blog, when I noted this Emily Dickinson poem in my excellent Twitter/X algorithm feed, I knew that it had a connection with my Rosemary. I spent a few minutes in bed this morning figuring out how to find or make an image that would go with the poem. This process is most satisfying and rewarding.

 The line “For I – inhabit Her – " to me means immediately that when I gaze at any flower in my (formerly ours) garden it is her face.

I previously wrote about it (see link below) where Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato manages in a lovely way to state that a van Gogh painting is van Gogh himself. 

van Gogh & Ernesto Sábato 

More Emily Dickinson blogs

In Ceaseless Rosemary

The Morns are meeker

A Favourite Just Noticed 

All the Witchcraft that we need 

It only gives our wish for blue 

My heart is laden 

Of bronze and blaze

The red and the white 

A Lady Red

Hands 

I took my power in my hands 

That clarifies the sight 

 Nature rarer uses yellow

Rosemary white and a bit of yellow 

Nature rarer uses yellow

Luck is not chance 

T is iris sir 

The white heat

I tried to be a rose 

nature rarer uses yellow 

The Tulip

Nor would I be a poet 

November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf 

Hilary Anne Stewart

As a young boy in Buenos Aires I remember when my mother and I took the number 35 tranvía from our Coghlan home. It snaked its way to her downtown apartment on Saenz Peña. On the way we passed the Villa Devoto Penintentiary where my father would spend unscheduled holidays courtesy of Juan Perón who did not like what my father wrote about him in the Buenos Aires Herald. A couple of years ago I even remembered Abuelita's apartment number. My mother wrote about the 35 in one of her poems:

I thought I'd never miss: -
The interminable wait for tram 35
The long & never ending route it took,
But I do
And I remember. - Filomena de Irureta Goyena Hayward

My mother often told me of that special comfort she felt in my abuelita’s apartment when we went to see her together. Somehow it was home for us.

Today my youngest daughter Lauren is coming for dinner. I do my best to repeat (I hope) in her a sense of comfort in her visit. I will serve her Rosemary’s Yorkshire pudding, a tomato and lettuce salad and we will drink freshly squeezed blood orange juice.

To get here from her job in Burquitlam, she has to take a Skytrain and a bus. Perhaps not that old Tram 35 but almost as arduous.     

The two portraits illustrating this blog (that first one I would title “The Baby from Hell” are of a b+w negative strip I found a few weeks ago buried with others. It is terribly under-exposed and even though I re-washed it, scratches and other stuff have remained. 

 To me what is unbelievable is that I took those pictures around 51 years ago. Hilary is now 52. While it really does not affect me I wonder what will happen to all those digital camera and phone pictures that people are taking now? Where will those photographs be in 50 years?