Friday, March 2, 2007

The Real Thing


He came from Norway, and she came from Sweden, but they met in Illinois. They got married, as people tend to do. He was the American ideal of an entrepeneur, even mining gold in Alaska for a little while that is now crumbled into glass disks that his grandaughters wear around their necks. They had children, and they moved to California, and the Depression didn't hit them quite as hard as it did the rest of the world. Sometimes they had a lot of money, sometimes not as much, but all in all it seems they had a good life.

Their daughter grew up to be a model, and while engaged to another soldier who was overseas, happened to meet the love of her life - another soldier on detour from his career as an artist - on leave in California. Her parents came from Scandinavia but met in Illinois. They came from Illinois but met in California. She soon broke up with her fiancee, and married her husband. They were together fifty-eight years before she died of pneumonia. He stood by her through cancer, lung disease, and losing both her legs to diabetes. She died while he was out getting lunch. It was a sad funeral, but he seemed content. I have, in fact, never seen someone so grateful just for having known someone. It was enough for him.

He still paints. After the War was over, he worked as an art director for the Coca-Cola corporation, advertising the idea of the American dream on a fizzing bottle of soda. And lest you be the cynical type about the advertisement of the American Dream, I like to think crass consumerism wasn't quite the case here - to him the picture of a smiling boy and girl weren't a lie or an illusion. It was just the truth (sponsored by Coca-Cola). He got to spend his life with his girl.

I asked him once what happened to his wife's ex-fiancee. He said he died an alcoholic after the war. He should've drank Coke instead, I thought.

Most artists back in his generation moved to Paris, opting for the starving artist life in pursuit of the posthumous fame of artistic success. I don't think he would have got on well with them. He's never sold a painting, but he seems content in the knowledge that he had the real thing - the wife he loved, the house, the children, the Life. It's another small story, and there aren't a whole lot of people to testify to it, but his wife died happy and from the looks of it he will someday too.

The happiest people I know just woke up every day, went to work, and came home to their family. Opportunity, to them, was taking what they had and making it into something better, and then regarding it with the satisfaction of a job well done, and of a life well led. It's not what they talk about in the movies we make, but it seems to me like the real thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great work.