“choose an unimportant day”(and enter to win a book!)

I spent much of yesterday sitting in the chaise on my screened porch immersed in “Our Town.” Although it’s been years since I last read the play, there was a time when I knew every line of it by heart. Returning to Grover’s Corners now, on a languid summer afternoon, I was caught off guard by just how familiar it still feels and, at the same time, how alive and fresh and real. I certainly didn’t expect tears to blur the lines of the third act.  It’s not as if there are any surprises there. And yet . . .

As an awkward high school freshman with a tiny role in a community theatre production of a play I’d never heard of, I had no idea that Thornton Wilder was about to rock my world.  I didn’t know that a few simple scenes played out on a nearly bare stage would profoundly shape the person I was becoming. And I certainly couldn’t have foreseen that, forty years later, I would be here – living in the town that inspired the play, sitting on a porch with that life-changing script in my hands, in a house that stands precisely halfway between the writers’ colony where Wilder wrote most of “Our Town” back in 1937 and the still-thriving summer theatre where he confided to the director of their first production, in 1940, that he never “meant that cemetery scene to be so depressing.”

All I knew back then was that I was drawn to theatre by a kind of hunger, the same way I was pulled into books — because I longed for something more, something I couldn’t even name but that hinted at the possibility of a life bigger and more exciting than the one on offer in my own small New Hampshire town.

Perhaps the stage would be my ticket out, or so I must have hoped when I showed up for that long-ago audition.  Too young and inexperienced to play Emily, I was cast as George’s little sister Rebecca.  By the end of the first read-through, I was in love with my brother.

And yet, in the end it wasn’t romance that jolted me awake and set me on my path toward adulthood.  (Although that all-consuming passion – unrequited at first, briefly returned for one hot, heady adolescent summer, then mourned through the tortured pages of several years’ worth of mortifying journals — certainly did mark a rite of passage.)

What my heretofore oblivious fourteen-year-old self took away from our many weeks of rehearsals and performances in a small white church hall was both simple and shattering:  a dawning awareness of life’s fleetingness.

Remarkably, the very mundane predictability that I was so eager to escape in my own boring life was the very stuff we were being asked to act out on stage – a mother calling her family to breakfast, a brother and sister annoying each other,  children being hurried off to school, the nightly burden of homework, idle gossip and small talk about the weather, fathers coming and going from work, the relentless accumulation of gestures and meals and days that are just like all the gestures and meals and days that have come before.

By fourteen I had lost a Camel-smoking 58-year-old grandfather to a heart attack in his raspberry patch. But I had never so much as paused to consider the losses yet in store. Nothing felt precarious because nothing ever changed. And so, little wonder, nothing felt precious, either.

And then, night after night after night, I watched Lauri Landry (two years older than me and still, hands down, the best Emily I’ve ever seen anywhere) walk across the stage and take her place among the dead.

It is one thing to attend a play, applaud the cast, exit the theatre and return to your life.  But it’s another thing entirely to live inside a play through months of rehearsals, run-throughs, and performances.  For better or worse, the stark truth beneath the words enters you at a cellular level, becoming forever more a part of who and what you are – all the more so if you are as young, impressionable, and unformed as I was then.

Instead of getting bored with “Our Town,” or tired of hearing the same old lines repeated show after show, I had the opposite response.  Every time I climbed the step ladder and looked at an imaginary moon alongside the first boy I had ever loved, it just brought us closer to the day when I would never stand on that ladder with him again.  I could hardly bear to think of it.  And every night, as Emily set foot back in her kitchen to relive her 12th birthday, begging, “Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me,” I was there in the wings, grateful for the dark so no one could see the tears running down my face.

It wasn’t just that I was pining for a boy. It was that in the course of learning and living in and loving “Our Town,” I also got the memo: No one gets out of here alive.  And once I had it, there was no way I could ever send it back.  Life might be mundane, repetitive, and excruciatingly predictable, but it was also short and therefore beautiful, a fragile tapestry of joys, losses, irretrievable moments and inevitable heartbreak.  Fail to pay attention, and I would miss the parts that mattered most.

Many years later, when my beloved friend Diane was dying of cancer at 55, far too young and painfully aware of all she would miss, I was struck both by her lack of self-pity and by her intense longing for what can only be called dailiness.  If she’d had a bucket list, her husband would gladly have bought plane tickets to Timbuktoo.  But all she wanted was more of what was slipping away – time to pick raspberries and put up a batch of jam, to take a walk with a friend, to bake a cake for her son’s birthday, to curl up on the couch and watch her favorite TV series through to the end, to see her daughter graduate from high school and her children get married and her grandchildren be born.

Of course, I got it. I looked at my own life, full of kids to shuttle around and meals to make and deadlines to meet, and wondered how I could have it so good while she was losing everything. And when I decided to try to write a book about change and grief and holding on and letting go, the title was the first thing I typed.  In the midst of teenagers growing up, selling a house, and all of us moving from one state to another and starting over again, the title was the only thing I knew for sure.  Thanks to Thornton Wilder and his play, I’d learned at a young age that when tragedy strikes or fate throws you a curve or life hangs in the balance, there’s really just one thing any of us want:  the gift of an ordinary day.

Four years ago, when my friend Ann Patchett was on book tour with her novel “The Dutch House,” she stayed for a couple of nights in our guest room.  Between her events in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, we did some yoga, took walks, and caught up with each other. As we strolled through town one mild October morning, I asked Ann if she had any ideas for her next book.  She did, just the smallest seed of one.  “I’m thinking I want to write a novel about a middle-aged woman whose life was changed by playing Emily in ‘Our Town’ when she was in high school,” Ann said.  Or, at least, this is how I remember it.  I do know I got a little too excited.

“Oh you must!” I exclaimed, immediately steering her toward Pine Street, where we could walk right past the houses known in local lore as Wilder’s inspiration for the Webb and the Gibbs family homes.  And then I told Ann my own “Our Town” tale, complete with all the euphoria and heartbreak of that indelible first love.  “Use any of it,” I said, pretty certain she wouldn’t use one bit. She was more than capable of making up her own story.

And yet, as Covid brought everyday life to a stop a few months later, and as Ann wrote a collection of essays instead of a novel, we checked in every so often about the “Our Town” book.  It was taking shape in her mind, she reported from Nashville. And then, at long last, it was taking shape on the page.  Here In Peterborough, with an almost eerie sense of Thornton Wilder hovering over this whole enterprise, I was urging her on, albeit, for mostly selfish reasons:  I couldn’t wait to read it.

Which brings us to this full-circle moment.  “Tom Lake” isn’t anything close to my “Our Town” experience (although there is a youthful love story, and Ann tells me her lost-boy heart throb is directly descended from my own).  And yet I keep discovering little bits of both my younger and my older self myself within its pages.  Perhaps this is the mark of a great piece of fiction: in a story about people who never existed, we discover some uncharted parts of ourselves and, in the process, become more fully cognizant of who we are – and more clear about what we’re here to do.

In a couple of weeks, Ann will embark on a 27-city book tour for “Tom Lake,” speaking and reading all across the country.  But she’ll start right here in New England, and the two of us will get to sit down in person at last and have a good long chat about her beautiful novel.  We’ll be on stage together in Concord, NH, on the evening of August 8 and we’d love to see you there. (Info and tickets are here.)

I read “Our Town” yesterday as self-assigned homework, to refresh my memory before our book event.  But spending an afternoon back in Grover’s Corners refreshed my soul, too.  It’s a very different play to me now, on the cusp of 65, than it was at fourteen. Despite the impression it made on me then, I know now, in a way no young girl possibly could, that one has to live some life and lose some people and grieve the passage of time in order to really appreciate “Our Town.”

I hope no one I love will ever need to plead “just look at me, one minute, as if you actually saw me.”  And yet, I do forget to look. We all do.  I forget to “realize life” as I live it, to be grateful for every ordinary moment, to pay attention to the beauty that is here, now.  But after 36 years of marriage, with two sons in their thirties, two parents approaching ninety, and an ever-lengthening list of loved ones who are gone, I do my best to inhabit these days fully, gratefully, eyes wide open to the beauty of each beloved face.  Nothing could be more important.

It’s 8 a.m. on a rainy Sunday morning as I type these words. In a few minutes, I’ll close my laptop and hop in the car and go pick up my father at the retirement apartment where he and my mom now live, on the other side of town.  We’ll stand in line at the bakery till it opens and buy some warm sourdough bread to bring home.  Not much of an outing, really, but it’s a chance to spend some time with my dad, something we both cherish.

Yesterday I found myself moved by a line near the end of “Our Town,” one I’d never paid much attention to before.  When Emily, newly arrived in the cemetery on the hill, tells the Stage Manager she wants to return to her old life for just one day, a happy day, she’s interrupted by her mother-in-law, who has been dead long enough to know better.

“No!” Mrs. Gibbs warns.  “Choose the least important day of your life.  It will be important enough.”   These are the words I’m taking to heart today.  Maybe you will, too.

enter to win a copy of “Tom Lake”

Publication date for “Tom Lake” is August 1.  It will be my pleasure to buy a copy for Ann to personalize for one lucky reader.  If you’d like to enter to win the book, just leave a note in the comments below.  Answer the question: What ordinary moment will you remember from today?  (Or, just say, “I’m in!). On August 1, I will choose one reader at random from the comments to receive a signed, personalized copy of “Tom Lake.”  If you wish to order a signed copy, you can do so directly from Parnassus Books in Nashville, here.

And be sure to check out Ann’s entire tour schedule here.  Chances are, she’ll be coming soon to a bookstore near you.  Happy summer reading to all!

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(and enter to win a book!) appeared first on Katrina Kenison.