Mallory's Camera

It's raining today, but that's good: If it's raining, it isn't snowing -- right? Clear sign that spring is on its way. The first crocuses are up in my yard.

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I’ve been listening to a lot of Brahms lately. Specifically the 4th Symphony and the very fine violin concerto that I can never remember whether it’s in D major or D minor and has an improvised riff at the end that every violinist plays differently, kind of an early forerunner of jazz.

Last night I played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody for the first time in maybe 15 years. The last time I played it Robin was maybe 18 months old and as the music started he bolted up, he grabbed White Bear – a stuffer that was actually bigger than he was at the time – and began dancing, these stunning Nijinski-like arabesques and jetés, perfectly executed. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life, that toddler dance recital.

And goddam, if he didn’t start doing that again last night. Although his technique is not nearly so good anymore.

Paging Bridey Murphy.

“Wait!” I said. “Does this music mean something to you?”

He nodded slowly.

“Where do you feel it?”

“In my heart.”

Is Robin really the reincarnation of Franz Liszt?

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I keep musing about those Japanese workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the ones who are interviewed and say, “"I feel very strongly that there is nobody but us to do this job, and we cannot go home until we finish the work.”

It’s just so odd to me.

I mean here they are applying the samurai code to life at TEPCO. Until the earthquake –a once in every ten centuries occurrence that nobody could have predicted, all protestations to the contrary – TEPCO was this profit-mongering corporate monster, draining the life’s blood out of the Japanese people. I mean, how could anyone have loyalty to TEPCO?

The Japanese really are very different from me.

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The photo is me at 60. I definitely look horrible and need to clean up those eyebrows. And start wearing foundation. Or something.

A man who was in love with me when I was 18 actually tracked me down on the Internet to send me four photographs he took of me in 1970. I promptly uploaded them to FB. No, not vanity – I just don’t want to lose them. I like this one the best because it makes me look an extra in an outtake from The Bicycle Thief.

It was the year I ran away to NYC and became a model. It’s so odd looking at these photos, remembering how obsessed I was at the time with not being skinny or beautiful enough. Literally – that was all I ever thought of: I’m not skinny enough! I’m not pretty enough!

I don’t know what I would tell this girl if I could travel backwards in time and talk to her. But I feel as though I should tell her something.

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In other news, I’m still feeling overwhelmed by world events – kind of as though I were a bug crawling up the wall of a burning building. RTT and I spent a very companionable day together yesterday watching episodes of Homicide – Life On the Streets and chatting about the lost city of Atlantis which may have been located near where Cadiz, Spain is today. It’s raining and all I want to do is curl up with my biography of Maugham and read. But I have a shitload of work to do. Sigh…