The Only Easy Days Were Yesterdays

Joseph Campbell said in an interview that 'We are every ancestor we've ever had,' or so I was told by an elder. Perhaps in our world of saturated images and dreams it suggests that the representations of the past share a similar relationship to those of the present, and consequently with us.

I find something tranquil in the old Saturday Evening Post covers. Something part pin-up, part elegant and familial. An illustration of the lost Americana, of all the shared acknowledgments of private lives, with a little softer edge. A frame just a little more patient than the angles of today; despite cover headlines that tackle dead space pioneers or racism or Mussolini, they seem warm and inviting. Now, you might say 'well, that time period had plenty of buried secrets and repressed attitudes and those covers did nothing but reinforce that,' which is plenty true. But real or not, there was a sense of buoyancy that was cut down too early in the Seventies and Eighties, as if reality contradicted hope. People wanted a dose of freedom, but they longed for it in the packaging of a simpler time. I guess I just wish that all the pain and strife in the world of now could come with a bow on top inviting enough to untie...