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COLUMNS:   Another Day in the Country: A Rockwell moment

Contributing writer

When I was a teenager, I first became acquainted with the work of Norman Rockwell. The reason I paid attention was that his art was on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The Post just happened to be my Grandpa Schubert’s favorite magazine. So, when I visited in Ramona and ran out of cousins to play with or plow horses to ride, I could always retreat to the upstairs room in the house at the end of Fourth Street and lose myself in a stack of old magazines.

The cover art was interesting, but the real draw was all the cartoons inside — every other page had something. For a preacher’s daughter who wasn’t allowed to read the comics, this was a treasure trove. The humor was delightful. I giggled away many an hour reading cartoons.

Continued stories were my next favorite thing in the Post — not the news stories or the feature articles but the exciting fiction. Usually I wasn’t allowed to read fiction. My mother said, “There are enough true things in the world for you to read that you’ll never read them all. So, there’s no need to read things that aren’t true.”

The concept that fiction could be as true as any slice of life escaped my mom.

In my opinion, no one has been able to capture the American public with art like good old Norman did with his covers so many years ago. Recently, I was tickled to see Rockwell was resurrected in Vanity Fair — not on the cover, but in a retrospective about the man and his ideology. Can it be that we are remembering Rockwell as we hanker for simpler days?

I think it is ironic that Rockwell, the man, wasn’t like his paintings at all — he was a non-church-going city boy who wasn’t close to his family. And yet his artwork has become synonymous with warm-hearted, church-going, rural America.

“What is it like to be an American?” he wondered and then answered that question in a stack of paintings that have come to define grass roots American life. It was simple people doing simple things, and Rockwell had an uncanny ability to hit the nail on the head, so to speak.

“The view of life I communicate,” Rockwell said, “excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.”

I can relate to Rockwell, as a writer, not a painter — I don’t have it in me to paint realism. But I emulate his style, to some degree, in my writing. When I write about life in the country, I, too, exclude the sordid and the ugly. I write about how it used to be or about that one minute out of 60 when it’s how I’d like it to be.

I do believe that little towns and quaint places have something wonderful to offer to the wider world. While a busy city is a huge mural of activity and color, a Rockwell moment is something profoundly simple: the look on someone’s face as they watch a couple saying grace, the gangly awkward teenage girl contemplating herself in the mirror, the family sitting down for Thanksgiving Day dinner.

“Have we lost these simple things?” we wonder. “Will we eat ‘take out’ this year if no one’s coming home?” “Are there any kids left who don’t grow up too fast?”

I keep looking for Rockwell moments to write about. I keep trying to create them whether it’s putting up scarecrows or dressing up on Halloween. When I can no longer find them, I’ll have to stop writing this column, I guess.

It’s another day in the country. The sun’s going down, the air is almost warm, and a little boy pedals by on his two-wheeler, heading home, silhouetted against the orange sky.

“Hey, Pat, look,” he calls, “I’m doing tricks,” as his hands fly into the air.

There are a thousand frames per second whizzing past in my Ramona movie and I pause to catch and cherish this one frame for today. I smile — it’s a Rockwell moment.

Last modified Oct. 29, 2009

 

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