Norman Rockwell: A Story
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. ~ Pablo Picasso
I remember the first time I heard the name Norman Rockwell.
It was springtime, baseball season.
I was playing shortstop and there was a pop-up along the third base line in foul territory.
I remember sprinting in front of third baseman, crossing into foul territory, and diving head first, with my glove out stretched before me and like a fat rain drop the baseball fell into my glove. Then I tumbled and rolled and landed on my back looking up at sky.
I remember how the crowd, moms and dads tucked into folding chairs, released a collective “Wow!” then broke into laughter when I pulled the ball from my glove and held it up, into the air, like the big leaguers do when they make a diving catch.
I stood up and my coach, whose name I can’t remember, Barry? Bill? rushed over to me.
“Wow! What a catch! That was like a Norman Rockwell painting or something.”
Dad drove home.
From the backseat I asked, “What is a Norman Rockwell painting?’
With the window down, his elbow nubbed out into the cool passing world, Dad explained that Norman Rockwell was a painter who painted these detailed pictures of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
“Does he still paint pictures?”
“No”.
“Why?”
“He died a long time ago.”
“Oh.”
I was 10 and remember, during that car ride, thinking how curious it was that a painting could out live it’s painter.
In August 2013 I got sick.
I’ve chronicled my illness before so I won’t I bore you with recycled facts. But if you lean in, if press your ear against the page, I will tell you something new. Something that was suppose to be ordinary but became a Rockwell.
A mousy nurse in scrubs opens the waiting room door and calls me back. She leads me down the hall to a scale. She instructs me to take off my shoes and step up on the scale. I offer her a smile. The kind of smile you give the person standing behind you in line at the supermarket when the person in front of you has too many cans of cat food and too many coupons.
Things are not good.
I have to hold onto the wall to take my shoes off. Still holding, my brain sends the command, “Right leg up” and my right leg responds like it should. I offer mousy nurse the supermarket smile again.
My left foot is flat on the ground and I want it up on the scale with my right. Again, my brain sends the command. But something is wrong. Something has been wrong since the calendar flipped August.
Like an old car sitting in the driveway too long, the transmission of signals is not smooth.
Left leg up. Left leg up. Left leg up. Left leg…up.
It wasn’t pretty but both feet finally found the scale. Young mousy nurse takes my height and weight and instructs me to step down.
She pretends to read my chart but is watching me stand at the edge of the scale, gripping the wall, hoping the messages being written in my brain are successfully sent through the interwebs of my torso and delivered on time to my legs.
I use the wall again. Right leg down. Left leg down. Left leg down. Left leg…down.
She won’t look at me when she points and says, “You can sit in that chair.” She knows I’m embarrassed.
While taking my blood pressure she notices I’m sweating and hands me a tissue.
She scratches down my blood pressure and doesn’t tell me my score and doesn’t ask me why I’m here today. She says, “good luck” offers me that supermarket smile again, opens the door and darts into the hall.
The doctor is in. He’s my primary doctor. We have known each other for years.
I tell him my symptoms and I tell him about the trouble with the scale. I tell him that my legs feel different, like their not connected to my brain, like I’m a giant toddler learning how to walk and he scratches down a few notes crosses his arms and wonders out loud if I had suffered a stroke.
He writes a some scripts, tells me not to panic but keeps repeating “proactive” which makes me panic and shakes my hand and wishes me luck.
Moving down the hall toward the waiting room I see this tacked on the wall…
I stop and stand in front of the painting long enough to replay the first story I told you today. How my coach — Barry? Bill? (…how imperfect memory can be!), with a smile and tufts of red hair billowing out from under his blue ballcap rushed to me and said “Wow! What a catch. That was like a Norman Rockwell or something.” And how that was the first time I had heard of Norman Rockwell. A painter obsessed with finding the extraordinary often lost in ordinary life.
Until August 2013 I defined myself as an athlete. Prided myself on my physicality. My ability to sprint across a baseball diamond and dive and catch instinctively, effortlessly.
But things were different now. The only chance I had to achieve extraordinary physical things was through the flawed process of memory.
Even now, my stomach becomes light and oily when I think about standing at the edge of the scale that day. Like standing on some suspension bridge, toes curled over the steel, a rushing river below, the mousy nurse witnessing a framed moment. A portrait of a man, his face bent with sadness and fear, afraid to jump or maybe, he’s more afraid to stay. A Norman Rockwell.
I push through the waiting room, into the parking and into my car. I cut the key and put down the window and like my father had done many years ago, nubbed my elbow out into the world.
“Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfect place I had thought it to be, I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be, and so painted only the ideal aspects of it.” — Norman Rockwell
No matter the medium — paintings, written stories all outlive their gods and possess a divine power able to terminate time. And since I can’t draw or painting, maybe I write stories to outlive my life, to strike a bolt of memory in the living.
Maybe that’s what Norman Rockwell aspired to do.
There’s a pile of scripts tagged with the doctor’s scribbled instructions, on the passenger’s seat advising me to be proactive.
I’m still sweating. I never want to see mousy nurse again.
I remember how that August wouldn’t quite. Waves of heavy humidity, days grinding into days giving me enough trouble for one lifetime.
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I’m a high school English teacher who writes about fatherhood, adulthood, life lessons, writing, literature and the power of the human narrative on my website writeonfighton.org.
