Poets, Saints, and Masters of the Unremarkable

My dear friend Judy comments about last week’s post: “So grateful for…the ordinary day.”

She adds that in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Mrs. Gibbs counsels her daughter-in-law, who has recently come over to the plane of the dead, to look ahead, not to go backward to visit life on earth.

But if you must, Mrs. Gibbs further counsels, “choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”

Against all advice, Emily chooses to go back to her twelfth birthday. As she watches the day unfold, she realizes how few of the living appreciate precious moments and asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?" The Stage Manager tells her, "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some."

How close do any of us come to being saints or poets?

Ann Patchett brings back Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town in her novel Tom Lake through layers that only a long talk in soft chairs with good coffee or tea could untangle. But one thematic consistency is apparent: How important it is to notice, cherish, and remark on the ‘unremarkable.’

Mrs. Gibbs and Judy are correct that even a single day, surrounded by laughing loved ones, gathered all together, would not require any other specialness.

As the musical group Bread sings, we would “give everything [we] own…” just to have the day, the person, the moments back again.

In the absence of such a magical trade-off (to recreate what we had and what we lost), we can only pay more appreciative attention to the present. Even when we are laboring every day with pressures of one kind or another, rushing here and there, we surely realize at some level that we could slow down and savor. To some degree, this is a choice. It is a way of living and noticing.

As Emily leaves her one-day earth visit, she says, "Good-bye Grover's Corners…Good-bye to clocks ticking…and Mama's sunflower. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up.”

I have lifted the Easter baskets from the top of the closet, placing small gifts inside each, even making one basket for our quirky little dogs, including the new Sheltie who has come to live with us (and baby makes three). I realize that I have grown to be a master of making something out of nothing, of tying ribbons on the ‘unremarkable.’ It is my way of counteracting neglect and cruelty and ignorance in all the places over which I have no influence at all.