Cliff Mountain @8373hbd - Tumblr Blog

The day my Dad dies, if I'm still alive, I won't be surprised if I cry uncontrollably, and I hope I will think back to this Rockwell piece and, how at first it makes me quite sad, but then I think I'll try to associate the piece with this other post, and the whole ordeal may make me smile or laugh, and feel better about the new life circumstance I will be facing

This Rockwell piece makes me so sad when I view it on its own. A father, contextually in 1950s hetero-normative rural America, expressing what maybe is a difficult vulnerability, by his sitting next to, stretching out his leg to even touch his son on a bench, and a son who doesn't understand or acknowledge the gesture. What's helping make it go down better is two things: 1) Taj Mahal with Etta Baker playing "Crow Jane", and 2) Thinking about (and feeling) the Dal from an Indian dinner with my Dad last night, and thinking about our servers who were two Indian men, maybe in their mid to late 20s, who, for some reason, fascinated me like Indian men often do because I don't typically feel unease around them, in fact I feel quite calm, as oftentimes the Indian men I encounter seem pre-occupied by their own affairs of the mind. This generalization about Indian men may be largely off-base, and maybe it is an intellectual fetishization of a group of people that is not accurate, or maybe it's my own perception of them