Tag: Thornton Wilder

We don’t have time to look at one another.
I didn’t realize.
All that was going on in life and we never noticed.
Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
– every, every minute? 
~Thornton Wilder, from Emily’s monologue in Our Town

An awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here.
People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up this hill. We all know how it is.
And then time…and rainy days…and sunny days..n’ snow…
We’re all glad they’re in a beautiful place
and we are coming up here ourselves when our fit’s over.
~Thornton Wilder from “Our Town”

“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”   —  Mrs. Gibbs to Emily in Our Town
We are ages away
from our high school class
where first we walked
the streets of Grover’s Corners
and have lived decades and
decades of important days
writing our own scenes
along the way. In this theater
we meet again the lives of people
as ordinary and extraordinary
as we are and find ourselves
smiling and weeping watching
a play we first encountered as teens.
In our 70’s Our Town brings us joy
and also breaks our hearts.
Now we know.
~Edwin Romond “Seeing “Our Town” in Our 70’s”

Last night, we watched the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder acted out by high schoolers under our son Nate’s direction. As it always does, this play hits me in my core: my mother also directed Our Town as a speech and drama teacher in a small town high school in Eastern Washington during WWII, while my dad was fighting in the South Pacific. Mom loved the play so much, she named me after one of the main characters. Nate didn’t know about that family connection when he chose it for his American Literature class production.

Watching “Our Town” at the beginning of my eighth decade is different than when I was in high school reciting Emily’s monologue in the graveyard. It is especially poignant this week after the 80th anniversary of D-Day, with only a few surviving liberators in attendance.

When our time gets short, we must realize life while we live it, every every minute, ordinary as they seem.

Wilder’s Pulitizer Prize winning words from “Our Town” still ring as true now as in 1938:
then, our country was crushed under the Great Depression,
now, our country staggers under a Great Depression of the spirit.
Though more economically secure, we are emotionally and morally bankrupt.

Even living through the most routine and unimportant days, may we always be conscious of our many treasures and abundance, striving to care for others in need.

So I search the soil of my life, this farm, this faith
to find what yearns to grow, to bloom, to fruit, in order
to be harvested to share with others.

I my so grateful for the tie that binds me to each of you who visit here, hoping what I share makes a difference in your ordinary, but precious, day.

Now I know…