on Rockwell

As I mentioned, I went to the dentist yesterday morning. Something I like about my dentist is that he’s put pictures on the ceiling so that you have something to look at when you’re lying there being picked at. He has chosen Norman Rockwell pictures, which I suppose is smart because they’re thoroughly unobjectionable, but since most Americans are well and truly familiar with Norman Rockwell’s work, they’re not exactly the most interesting pictures in the world to look at whilst dentistry is thrust upon you.

One of the pictures up there was this one:

At first I didn’t look at it very carefully, because it was below a picture of a boy riding a mallard and a girl with a black eye sitting outside the principal’s office. The boy in the white suit is so cheesy that the picture didn’t draw my attention more than the others.

At first. And then I looked at it more closely, and noticed the detail on the older man, the folds of his chambray shirt and the worn lines of his forehead. And the melancholy of the dog. And the old car they sat on. And I started to wonder what exactly this picture was saying.

It was on the ceiling (and the edges were cropped a bit), so I couldn’t see it carefully enough to figure it out. From that distance, I thought that the boy and the man were both waiting for something (both are clearly in postures of waiting, just two very different ones), like a bus, but that they weren’t related. It seemed that Rockwell was trying to point out their differences as obviously as possible, because even the art style is a little bit different between the two. The boy is Saturday Evening Post all the way, where the man is more Grapes of Wrath. The boy looks like a mistake, as if he’s in the wrong picture, although his bright white suit makes him the focal point of the picture, so clearly the contrast is on purpose. It was comical, maybe, that contrast. Almost to the point of ironic. Or maybe Rockwell was trying to show life as it’s fresh and new and full of promise vs. life as it’s old and weak and tired and fading. Both lives are waiting for a bus. You can meet anybody when you’re waiting for a bus in America. Diversity at the bus stop. I don’t know, it wasn’t clear to me what the picture could have meant and I was just guessing.

I Googled the picture, discovered its title, “Breaking Home Ties,” looked at it much more closely, and read an essay about it. Both men are waiting for a train, but they are father and son, and the train they’re waiting for is going to take the boy away to school. The man is holding the boy’s hat as well as his own, and they share a father-son resemblance. The boy is looking forward while the man is looking back.

I find this picture so sad that I can’t even put words to it. The more I look at it, the more sad I think it is, and the more perplexing I find its sadness, because I don’t know where a picture like this belongs. Who wants to see a picture like this on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post? (But that’s just where it went, on September 25, 1954.) The boy’s happiness is misplaced in the emotional context of the rest of the picture, and I just see a fool when I look at him.

Maybe I’m projecting. But God, that poor dog. He looks like he’s going to curl up and die without the boy. The last mystery is what the boy’s cradling in his hands; I can’t quite tell. Maybe it meant something to Rockwell, about the future, or about the past.