I generally stop at the top of the driveway to check the mail if I’ve been out on an errand. It’s not a long driveway, but unless we run out of kibble or I need a book from the library, the “mail”, such as it is, sits untended and neglected for days. We like our postal delivery person quite a lot; he is kind to our pack of hounds when he drives in to deliver a package, so I’ll rouse myself after a few days of letting the mail sit just to honor his good faith in delivering whatever has been bulk mailed our way. I should just keep the recycling bin at the top of the driveway as well.

I mentioned my lack of interest in the mail to a younger guy at the printer’s store …* 

*Almost everyone I speak with is younger, and I consciously wrote lack of interest instead of “disinterest” because I was trained to note that to be disinterested is to have no particular personal involvement in a situation. As the world has spun, however, and in contemporary usage, disinterest is now considered a proper choice when describing a lack of interest. I could stay testy, but  Kurt Vonnegut and the Tralfamadorians remind me that the proper response to unexpected change is, “So it goes.”

I could also note that the printer shop is where I go to get photographs printed up as there are no photography stores in my universe and Kodak now makes pharmaceutical products, an observation that meshes nicely with the conversation I have cited but not described. I spoke of the excitement with which I once checked the mail and my lethargy as a mail patron today. I’m pretty sure the guy at the counter said “Huh” and handed me a print.

In my 1950’s file, “Gone But Not Forgotten”, I have a lumpy recollection of finally receiving the “toy” advertised in the back of a comic book, a plastic scuba diver, described as a frogman, who, when filled with baking soda, would actually dive in my bathwater. Now THAT made checking the mail worthwhile. Code rings, sea monkeys, Charles Atlas exercise manuals, and X-Ray Vision glasses were pretty hot stuff, but so was the delivery of catalogs, at that point in the evolution of merchandising, arriving once a year, in October or November, in time for Christmas list compositions. 

Magazines too were worth the wait. I’m sure The New Yorker and The New Republic offered deep thoughts and important cultural observations to the adults, but I zipped to the mailbox for Sports Illustrated and The Saturday Evening Post.

I’ve just received the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, published in time to offer a preview of athletes and events coming soon in the Paris Olympics. The magazine had disappeared for a while but showed up this month and may be a quarterly or not? I get all the basic sports info I need from cable tv and the world wide web these days, but I do miss smart and often very funny writing from sports guys with a ton of perspective about the sports they cover. Until I’m sure a print copy of SI is on the way, I’m certainly not going to run to the mailbox looking for a magazine that as far as I can gather is mildly hypothetically alive at the moment.

On the other hand, the Saturday Evening Post, which I thought had conked out sometime in the blurry late years of the 1960’s, has been reconstituted under several auspices, currently publishing six issues a year by a nonprofit, The Saturday Evening Post Society. I’ve just subscribed and expect to hop up the driveway on a more ambitious schedule as the delivery of a print edition approaches.

The history of the magazine is as complex as the history of the nation it sought/seeks to serve. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote more than sixty short stories for the Post, including two of my favorites, “Babylon Revisited ” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair, both of which are often included in contemporary anthologies of best short fiction. A lengthy article by Jack Alexander in March, 1941 was the first to describe the early successes of Alcoholics Anonymous and is considered a significant milestone in AA’s history. Other authors included a remarkable range of sensibilities, from Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut,and Ogden Nash to William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, JohnSteinbeck, and William Saroyan. 

Without hunkering down in an account of my misspent youth, I admit that rather than participate in life as I knew it, I read widely, grabbing every opportunity to read anything NOT assigned in grades three through twelve. I could often get through an issue of the Post before being nabbed by the school’s librarian. I got through the current runs pretty quickly and began dusting off copies our library had wedged in a basement shelf. Discretion was never my strongest suit, and when compelled to participate in the eighth grade recitation competition, I found a poem in The Saturday Evening Post  that amused me, “Pershing at the Front” by Arthur Guiterman. The great attraction of the piece was that it included a word so powerful, so outrageous that I knew my audience would be shocked into silent horror. The opening of the poem is unremarkable:

“The General came in a new tin hat

To the shell-torn front where the war was at;

With a faithful Aide at his good right hand

He made his way toward No Man’s Land,

And a tough Top Sergeant there they found,

And a Captain, too, to show them round.”

Stanza by stanza, Pershing and his companions move from trench to trench, the Sergeant whispering as they progress toward the front. 

“The silence lay in heaps and piles

And the Sergeant whispered, “Just three miles.”

And the Captain whispered, “Just three miles.”

And the Aide repeated, “Just three miles.”

“Just three miles!” the General swore,

“What the hell are we whispering for?”

And the faithful Aide the message bore,

“What the hell are we whispering for?”

And the Captain said in a gentle roar,

“What the hell are we whispering for?”

“Whispering for?” the echo rolled;

And the Sergeant whispered, “I have a cold.”

Should you feel compelled to research the poem, you will find that contemporary versions have cauterized the ending, replacing “…the hell…” with “What in the heck are we whispering for?”, a line that no longer scans properly and is absolutely nothing that General John J.  Pershing might have said in the midst of battle. I spoke my truth, spat out the inflammatory (!) words, and sat happily in my classroom as the audience reeled. Lest a reader find this an innocuous recitation, it’s worth noting that in my youth the word “hell” was routinely replaced with “heck”, “what the hay”, “what in the Sam Hill”, and the least disturbing of all, “ H – E Double Hockey Sticks”.

Recurring cartoons, such as Ted Kay’s Hazel, which ran in the Post from 1943 until 1969 were simultaneously puzzling and intriguing. We didn’t have a maid; no one I knew had a maid. I guessed there was much to learn about the wider world, even more than identifying the sources of domestic help humor, so I concentrated on decoding the images that appeared on the cover of the magazine each week.

A number of illustrators contributed to the magazine, including Earl Mayan whose Yogi Berra cover still lives in my imagination, but the Norman Rockwell covers operated at a level that has informed my sense of self for decades. Almost all of the adults I knew were artists, architects, and authors, pretty darned serious about their work and pretty darned convinced that abstract expressionism and modern architecture had finally surpassed the pedestrian figurative and sentimental sensibilities of previous generations. My problem was that I had lost myself (no mean feat!)  in illustrations by Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, J.C. Leyendecker, Arthur Rackham, and Maxfield Parrish.  I don’t remember Rockwell’s name coming up in the endless conversations describing the ways in which contemporary society clearly just didn’t understand genius, but if it had, I’m pretty sure they would have used a word like “kitsch” to describe his work.

Here’s what I understood about the art that Norman Rockwell presented: 

Sure, the subjects of his scenes could have been described as sentimental in that it was clear that the artist was fond of kids, dogs, baseball, adults, holidays, and the American landscape. Me too, with the possible exception of adults. Every portrait was posed, of course, but they felt to me like snapshots of a world I would probably like considerably more than the life I happened to inhabit.

His paintings too were suffused with good natured wit. I can’t begin to describe the best of the more than 300 covers Rockwell did for the Post, but one, published in February of 1960 encapsulated the wry unselfconscious view of the artist in the act of creating a cover. Known now as the Triple Self-Portrait, the painting actually shows at least seven self-portraits, three of Rockwell, and small self-portraits by Durer, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rembrandt. Rockwell sits on a stool, back to the viewer,craning his neck and slumping sideways to catch his reflection in a mirror set to his left. His unfinished sketch is a face floating in the upper center of the stretched canvas. The portraits of the celebrated artists have been pinned on the upper right hand corner of the canvas, what could be considered five unfinished roughed out self-portraits of Rockwell are tacked to the upper left of the canvas. The image of Rockwell in the mirror is less clear, and light reflected on his glasses creates a pair of white circles in the slightly out of focus face.

Yes, I am a sucker for mirror magic. Indelible images stick with me as I remember Citizen Kane, The Lady From Shanghai, Last Year in Marienbad, but the Rockwell cover is a notably non-”arty” use of the mirror, simultaneously a peek behind the curtain and recognition of the artist’s impulse to transform the awkward figure in the mirror to the larger and more impressively detailed portrait on the canvas. Equally self-deprecating is Rockwell’s inclusion in other paintings, essentially cameos similar to the shots Alfred Hitchcock included in his modern films. He’s in the corner of the painting I’ve included at the top of this piece, one of a crowd crossing a street as a sailor and young woman have a conversation I want to hear outside a club which will never welcome them as members.

I still find his droll depiction of sports and holidays amusing and his celebrations of a nation’s best instincts reassuring, but have not yet escaped the conviction that, for the most part, the people in his world didn’t look much like me, and the circumstances in which they found themselves, however momentarily distressing or awkward, indicative of lives lived far more bountifully than mine. Network television did all that it could to remind me of households I would never meet, but the Rockwell paintings were far more evocative.

I have no idea what the newly reconstituted Saturday Evening Post will present me as I summon the will to trudge up the driveway to inspect the mail. The most recent edition presented an article on falconry and an archived examination entitled, “Who Really Started the Pop Revolution?”. Seems just about right and certainly worth checking the mail from time to time.