Our Town

I must have been 12 when I saw Our Town for the first time and fell in love with the minimalist sets, Thornton Wilder’s gentle, ironic humor, and his astute observations of “the way we were in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”

There’s a specific delight in introducing your kids to some of your favorite things and watching them discover it anew. Last summer, my daughter Megan and I drove to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore. to see Our Town. I loved watching her experience the play…getting tears in her eyes through some of the same scenes that struck me when I was her age.

My clearest memory of the play is the third act, where rows of chairs line the stage as graves. Emily, escorted to death through childbirth, is struggling to rest in peace. When she discovers that the dead can revisit scenes from life, she decides to go back to her twelfth birthday, despite stern warnings from her fellow deceased souls. And the dead souls are right. You can’t go back.

You can’t bear to watch people walking blithely through their days never noticing that the ordinary is what makes life extraordinary. Emily observes her birthday and realizes that everyone in her family was moving through their daily routine never pausing to really look and see and savor what was contained in those moments.

“Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?” Emily asks the stage manager who narrates the play.

Hardly anyone save the “saints and poets, maybe” ever realizes life, the stage manager replies.

Wilder was right that death provides us all with special lenses through which to see our lives for a time. It’s the stark reminder to prioritize well and savor the ordinary moments that grow into some of our best memories.

In March of this year, a private plane crashed in Montana killing the pilot and three young families. My high school classmate and friend, Vanessa, was aboard that plane with her husband and two children. In that plane crash, Vanessa’s parents lost two daughters, two sons-in-law and five grandchildren. Friends of my parents’ also lost their son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. Their daughter-in-law was expecting her third child. I think about all of the families touched by this tragedy and pray for them often. I can’t even imagine how they are facing each day.

The thoughts take me back to our hometown. And high school.  And my memories of Vanessa. Our group of friends used to camp and rock climb in Joshua Tree. We spend carefree Saturday afternoons playing Ultimate frisbee in the park (our most memorable game went on in the pouring rain and mud so that we looked like a commercial for Tide laundry detergent when we finished). We snow skied in Mammoth during school breaks, and during the school year, we rotated through each others’ homes renting old Hitchcock movies to watch late at night, or making homemade ice cream to eat while sitting in a hot tub.

At Vanessa’s memorial service, I loved hearing the memories from friends who have stayed closer to her in the ensuing years. (After college, she and I exchanged Christmas cards and letters but never seemed to be able to coordinate a visit.) The memories were utterly consistent with the Vanessa that I knew. She was genuine and kind and intelligent. Organized without being rigid. Generous and unflappable. An amazing hostess who was never pretentious or unnatural. It’s no surprise to me that she instigated an annual appreciation brunch for her kids’ teachers and the administration at her children’s school–it’s just the kind of thing Vanessa would think to do, and be able to pull off well.

When I remember Vanessa, it seems to me that one of her finest gifts was her ability to live graciously in each moment. Was she one of Wilder’s saints or poets? I don’t know. But her life certainly reminds me to realize life as we live it. Every, every minute.