Our Town

EMILY: (Softly, more in wonder than in grief) I can't bear it. They're so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I'm here. I'm grown up. I love you all, everything--I can't look at everything hard enough. --Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"

I was looking for a piece to do for my sophomore Shakespearean Idol. I wanted to do something from Ian McEwan's Atonement, but it was checked out from the library then. So I asked Ms. Frkovich and she recommended "Our Town" to me. Lovely play. It was simple, but then left me thinking about the little things in life. And that was just what Thornton Wilder wanted from me: "to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." I do not know much about plays or theatre or Thornton Wilder, but Emily's monologue rang so true to me. We overlook the small worth and luck, we all, like Emily, "can't look at everything hard enough." I remember Lina's essay at Ragdale. She wrote about her grandparents. How they were growing old and how she was growing up. How dumbfounded she was to realize something so profound, only so much later in time. I agree with her belated insight. On a journal entry dated November 8, 2009 I wrote: "I would like to see my parents age as much as they would have liked to see me grow."