“The past cannot be relived. Living people, humans, occupied with their petty occupations and small thoughts, know little of true joy or happiness. Truth is only to be found in the future.” -Thornton Wilder
“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 always be at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another.” -Simon Stimson, Grover’s Corners choir director
“Now there are some things we all know but don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. 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.” -Stage Manager of Grover’s Corners
Life in Grover’s Corners is a slow burn. Every morning in this town just across the border from Massachusetts, the horizon clicks on. The papers and milk are delivered. The cop checks on the town dam. The train goes by on its way to Boston.
For the 2,642 souls in Grover’s Corners, the days are spent mulling over love, duty, and the weather. Of these, the weather is the easiest to talk about – snowstorms, rain, the terrible, terrible moon. Love is trickier – wet, new love; unrequited crushes; abandoned love like a whisper through a marriage.
In any small town, we tacitly agree to ignore the reversible tragedies of our neighbors. After all, duty is straightforward and compassion difficult. It is as if we are all in our own boxes, spending our hours running around after our own passions, finishing our own homework. True emotion is rare. And so, perhaps one of us gives up on his education and leaves without a degree. Perhaps one of us works so much she never sees her boyfriend, her friends, her family. Perhaps one of us drinks himself into an early grave.
Life in Grover’s Corners, much as life anywhere, retreats into parable, into picking each other up and then dropping them again. Welcome to Our Town.
EFS, 1 April 2007