Visions of Sugarplums, er, of iPods, Wii’s, Laptops

I came across that Norman Rockwell picture the other day.

I was quite fascinated by his images of life in America back in the 1940’s, thanks to the covers of the Life magazines that occasionally found their way to us in Trinidad.

I thought of the soldier having to find and unfold that unwieldly paper map, balance it on his knee and having to try to fold it up again along its original creases. Perhaps because I was looking at the picture on the Net on my Christmas present, a new iPod Touch, and not on a worn Life magazine cover, I wondered how Norman Rockwell would portray life now.

That’s when the second image, of Christmas 2007, flashed into my mind. The bulky passive paper map would be gone, replaced by the laptop. The straining to imagine the unknown, foreign terrain, as the narrator laboriously traced the scene of his narrative, with his finger, along inert ink lines was replaced by eager faces absorbed by an interactive map with vivid images, sounds and animations, even live webcams, that popped up at the touch of a finger at any point along Santa’s journey.

I thought of how Norman Rockwell conjured up life as retired seniors: a couple, evidently elderly, placidly rocking on their rocking chairs on their verandah, he reading a newspaper, she with her apron reading a cookbook, maybe, or a housewifely magazine. Then I considered my wife and I, in our recliners she surfing on her iPhone, me on my iPod Touch (yes, I didn’t qualify for the iPhone, but the Touch will do very well). As for whether we look obviously elderly, I’ll leave that to an objective outsider, but it’s common now for seniors not to look elderly even if they haven’t had Botox, tummy tucks or other such enhancements.

Instead of visiting the grandparents for a tale of long ago, the grandchildren pop in to challenge them to a game of tennis on their Wii, or introduce the adults to some new site they found on Google or show them how to Twitter.

I think even Norman Rockwell would delight in putting down his brushes for a while to attend to his Facebook profile.