As a high school teacher of American literature, one of the plays we read was “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder.

Here’s how the story begins. “No curtain. No scenery. The audience arriving sees an empty stage in half-light.”

A character called the Stage Manager appears and tells the audience where the stores are in Grover’s Corners. He points to where hitching posts for horses would be and says, “First automobile’s going to come along in about five years.”

Then he points to empty spaces on the stage where the grocery and drug stores would be. He points to the area where the high school would be.

The play begins with the town’s residents having small talk about this and that, and this pattern goes on in each act. A few pages into the play, a student of mine would raise a hand.

“Mr. Strack, is anything going to happen in this play? It seems to be a lot about nothing.”

She was right — to a point. Each act begins with very little plot or action until a central character of the story, Emily Webb, marries her childhood sweetheart. Emily tragically dies at age 26 while giving birth. She’s buried in the local cemetery, but her soul is given a moment of spiritual conscience to look back at her life. She wishes she could come back to the living.

Emily begins to understand life like she had never done before.

“We don’t have time to look at one another,” she says. “I didn’t realize all that was going on that I never noticed. Take me back up the hill — to my grave. But first, wait! One more look.

“Goodbye, goodbye world. … Goodbye to clocks ticking, and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Emily looks to the Stage Manager and asks him a question: “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

“No,” says the Stage Manager. “The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”

From another student in my class, “So, she dies and she misses coffee and flowers and clocks ticking? What a boring life she had.”

Emily wanted to pick a very important day and watch herself relive it. At the cemetery, Mrs. Gibbs, who died from pneumonia, said, “Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”

Another character, Simon Stimson, speaks from the grave. “Yes, now you know. That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those ... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”

If my students were still casting off the play as “a lot about nothing,” I would choose one and proceed to ask a few questions.

“What did you do yesterday?”

“Nothing, really,” the student would say.

“What did you eat for breakfast?”

“A chocolate doughnut.”

“Was anyone home when you left for school?”

“My mother was home.”

“Did you speak with her?”

“Not really.”

“When you went outside, were there clouds in the sky? Was it windy? Did you hear anything like a dog barking?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Exactly,” I say. “After Emily dies, look what she misses the most. The smell of fresh coffee, the sound of a clock ticking, taking a hot bath, the feel of a newly ironed dress. All the little things she took for granted in her life.”

I’d then say to my student. “You’d miss chocolate doughnuts, the clouds and the wind upon your face, the everyday stuff that doesn’t matter now. But if suddenly it was all gone, you’d realize they were the details that defined your life while living with those who mattered most to you.”

While watching an ordinary day of her life from the grave, Emily makes a final remark that she wishes her mother could hear. “Mama, just look at me one minute like you really saw me.”

At the end of the story the Stage Manager says, “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars … everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people who ever lived have been telling us that for 5,000 years, and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

We downplay the importance of the day-to-day things that we do with the people we love that define our brief lives we have here on earth. When loved ones die, we keep them eternally alive within us through memories of the ordinary experiences we shared with them. When we die, we stay alive in the same manner in the hearts of others. That way, death never ends life.

Here’s another great line from the play: “You’ve got to love life to have life, and you’ve got to have life to love life.”

Throughout our busy lives, our jobs, our appointments, paying bills, driving here, there and everywhere until completely exhausted we fall asleep for a few hours and do it again, time passes, days and years go by. Suddenly, if we’re fortunate enough, we get old and we remember the house we grew up in, Mom’s meatloaf, the tree we climbed in the backyard, and the neighbor’s that never stopped barking.

So, smell the coffee. Look at the clouds. Taste the wind upon your face. Listen to the sounds of songbirds. Feel the comfort of the clothes you wear. They are the fabric of our lives that create our memories, and let us not take for granted the people we love.

Look at them for one minute like you really saw them.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com