Thoughts on Revisiting Our Town

By Coleen Armstrong

I hadn’t even glanced at Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play in well over a decade––but since I’d been assigned a class of 11th graders and was beginning a new unit, I thumbed hurriedly through the American Lit textbook to find the section on drama. I scanned the stage manager’s familiar, opening lines and smiled in recognition. But after reading only five pages, I was stunned to find my throat closing and my eyes misting.

The following day, I confessed to my class that I’d sat up late, rereading the entire thing. Then I warned them that once, long ago, this play had literally transformed my life––and that the same thing would probably happen to them.

They stared at me.

I’d been 16, a high school junior myself, captivated by Wilder’s chronicle of everyday existence in 1901 Grovers Corners, New Hampshire. The setting had struck an instant chord. My grandmother had died a year earlier, and I now treasured more than ever her vivid, detailed stories of a girlhood on a southern Ohio farm in the 1890s. Over time I’d grown to feel as if I knew her family well––mother, father, two sisters, one brother. Now that she was gone, it seemed as if I’d lost the others too.

Sixty years after my great-grandparents had labored on their farm, my own parents were working equally hard. My dad was a CPA who traveled a great deal; my mom a housewife who washed, ironed, cooked, and cleaned for a family of six. And never, as Wilder’s stage manager pointed out, a nervous breakdown.

One night when I was around 12, Dad brought home a small, brown record player. He placed it on the kitchen floor, plugged it in, and then we all listened as it emitted the scratchy, tinny sounds of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue. From that night on, dinnertime always meant music. Sometimes Gershwin, sometimes Mozart or Mantovani––the good stuff. Years later, as an adult, that memory became emblematic to me of two strong, loving parents on a very limited budget who still found ways to give their four children small doses of culture.

Then in high school came Our Town. I sat, only half-listening to my English teacher, who was droning through Acts One and Two. My eyelids grew heavy. But in Act Three, Emily died and returned to relive her 12th birthday, recognized the beauty in common, everyday events, and cried, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” and I sprang to attention––alert, transfixed, my mouth agape. I suddenly understood why I felt so close to those great-grandparents I’d never known, and why my father’s budgeting to buy occasional LPs had touched me so deeply. It was all part of an enduring pattern, of parents centering their very lives around endless, mundane tasks, moving heaven and earth to provide for their families, knowing that in one way their efforts made no impact whatsoever, yet in another, the greatest impact of all. Children grew up, hardly remembering their own parents’ many sacrifices, yet still passing on the same tireless devotion to their own kids. And so on, generation after generation.

But the message went deeper: Emily also realized how much she’d taken that love and dedication for granted, and worse, she felt the pain of knowing what the future would bring to those she cared about most.

As a child in 1895, my grandmother couldn’t have foreseen that within three years her father would die horribly, dragged by a horse while plowing his field. She would experience the unspeakable trauma of watching helplessly from a nearby porch. Her widowed mother would become a charity case; the entire family would eventually be taken in by a kind uncle. And years later, her beloved brother would drown in France during World War I.

My parents couldn’t have foreseen that my sister would be swallowed for several years by the late 1960s’ drug culture––or that my brother would hitchhike to California after graduating college in 1970 and not return for over two decades––or that my other brother would be arrested as a teenager for a foolish prank called car theft.

They couldn’t have known that those family dinners listening to Gershwin would be among our happiest times.

But I was permanently changed. As if bopped on the head by a fairy godmother’s magic wand, I was suddenly endowed with superpowers of observation. I felt, really felt the scratchy wool socks I wore with my saddle shoes. Saw, really saw the fleeting look of desperation on the face of the class clown who tormented our science teacher. I attended high school parties, dances and football games––enjoying myself, but also watching from a distance, feeling older and wiser, always wondering, Does anyone else realize how quickly all of this will be gone?

As a teacher, I tried to explain. At first my students didn’t get it. How could they? This play is dumb, they insisted. Nothing happens; people just talk-talk-talk about stupid stuff. So my first assignment was to ask them to listen, really listen to what their friends discussed at lunch that day. Make notes, and then report back.

They returned, laughing. Most conversations had been about what who was wearing what, who’d said what to whom, who was no longer speaking to whom and why, everyone’s plans for the weekend. Nothing that really mattered––except to those who had the floor. A lot like Our Town, but with different clothing, hairstyles, slang, and snippets of modern technology.

Then I made another assignment: Write about an episode in your life which at the time didn’t seem particularly memorable or impactive––but later on, when your life’s circumstances had altered, it became a singularly beautiful and cherished moment.

To my amazement, no one needed to percolate. Shoulders hunched; scribbling ensued.

Stacie wrote about riding on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle on a perfect spring morning, her long, red hair whipping out of her helmet as she locked her arms around Joe’s chest and rested her head against his back. But that was the last day they’d spend together. A week later Joe took back his class ring to give to someone else. Stacie could still smell the aroma of his leather jacket and feel his heart beating against her hands.

Greg wrote about a summer evening when he was nine and his brother ten. His dad had piled them and their mom into the car to get ice cream. But it was their last night as a family. A month later, his parents told Greg and his brother they were getting a divorce. Greg described the taste of cold, creamy chocolate inside his mouth, how he and his brother bickered good-naturedly in the back seat on the way home while his parents conversed softly in front, the hum of the car’s tires against the road and the softness of the breeze blowing from the open window into his face.

And dozens more.

Now it was safe to tell the class that although my older daughter was now in college, I could still feel the newborn velvet of her skin, hold her tiny feet in one hand and see her blue eyes fastened intently on mine. How? Because in 1973, I’d been paying very careful attention, simultaneously living the experience and also committing it to memory. Otherwise, as Emily said, “It all goes too fast.”

They understood. The ability to recognize beauty in ordinary events as they occur, thereby keeping and preserving them forever, was a gift that Wilder’s Emily could give to all of us.

“Do human beings ever realize life? Every, every minute?” she inquired. “The saints and the poets, maybe,” the stage manager answered. To which I might add: English teachers too.

And their students.

Coleen Armstrong is the author of The Truth About Teaching: What I Wish the Veterans Had Told Me and co-author of Please Don't Call My Mother, with John Lazares.