I recently visited a museum where there was a retrospective on Norman Rockwell's paintings and Saturday Evening Post covers. In addition to his ability as an artist, he was an astute judge of human character with its humor, foibles, and sentiments. When I lived in Japan in the 1950s my step-father was involved in getting Japanese scholars, who were going to the United States on the Fulbright exchange program, ready for their yearlong plunge into a different culture. One of the comments made to these Japanese, was that if they could understand the weekly Saturday Evening Post covers --- what made them funny or sad or nostalgic --- they would understand American culture.
I felt a little bit like that in the museum last week. The exhibition ran from the twenties through the sixties, and I felt as if I might need to explain some of the subtleties of the illustrations before us to those younger than I. Take for example the young ladies depicted on covers from the twenties. They all had short bobbed hair, which I imagine very few in the exhibit would recognize as a rebellious statement. Part of the surge towards female suffrage after World War I was the cutting off of the long locks that had been an essential part of womanhood before that seminal event. A small thing, but a part of history, and a subtlety preserved in the artist's rendering.
There were also covers that just brought back the fashions and activities of another time and place --- my youth. Two or three scenes showed young teen-age girls, their jeans rolled up to reveal cuffed white socks known as bobby socks. I remembered wearing that height of fashion as a young girl, and cannot imagine now why that was such a fad. There were also pictures of children playing on stilts, and I can still recall the thrill of marching down my front walk finally able to triumphantly perch on my high roost.
It made me realize one of the facts of being older is that we seniors are the glue that links the past to our present times. This can be good in that we remember similar events and the fact that we as people or a nation lived through them. Or it can be not so good when we cling to ideas long outgrown by the next generation.
One last example of the importance of the reach of old age. I had an African-American friend who was a teacher and had organized the local teachers for the march on Washington when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech. She sat on the platform with him at the Lincoln Memorial which was itself a wonderful glimpse back into history. But even more of a reach was the fact that she, a woman now in her nineties, told me that her mother had been born a slave, and moreover, her mother's father had been her mother's owner. As she spoke I could feel my hand reaching back and back to touch an event out of my own life experience, something I have never forgotten. There is power in glue.