Carnett: Be thankful in the moment

In hindsight, I view it as our family’s Gold Standard for Thanksgivings.

It was a Thornton Wilder tableau, circa 1982.

Remember Wilder? He was an American playwright who wrote such family-themed classics as “Our Town” and “The Long Christmas Dinner.”

His contemplative spirit gave us fictional Grover’s Corners, N.H. — America’s slightly nostalgic but totally unpretentious hometown.

“Our Town,” winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, provides us with an allegorical look at life. Some of the play’s basic assumptions today appear to be overly sentimental. Personally, I’d label those assumptions refreshing. Over the last 80 years, modern culture has moved decidedly away from thoughtful reflection toward churlishness and cynicism.

For example, the Stage Manager of “Our Town” 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 stars … everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”

Wilder’s opinion was widely accepted when he penned those words in 1938. Not as much today. Yet the play continues to draw crowds. Amateur and professional companies successfully mount productions every year across this great land.

It strikes a nerve.

“Our Town” laments the fact that we humans, while introspective by nature, only rarely make an effort to ponder the eternal. All too frequently we take life for granted and overlook its wonder.

“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” Wilder’s character, Emily Webb, says in the midst of being gobsmacked by an epiphany. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

Precious few.

For audience members observing Grover’s Corners through the theater’s “fourth wall,” it’s a circumscribed environment. Its inhabitants live in a small world that, to them, changes seasons slowly. To us, the Grover’s Corners calendar gallops by. At one point the Stage Manager inadvertently loses track of time and feels compelled to rush things forward.

The seasons of my own life, I’ve noticed, are advancing ever more swiftly.

Were I allowed to “relive” a moment in time — as Emily does — I’d settle for Nov. 25, 1982. Thanksgiving. I bet you have a similar moment as well.

During my visitation, I’d listen more attentively to conversations around our dinner table. My father and my son were both with us in ’82. They now lie next to one another in the “cemetery on the hill.”

The faces of dad and Jimmy beamed that fall afternoon. Dad was a robust 60-year-old. Jimmy, 14. My three daughters were ages 11, 7 and 4. Our eight beautiful grandchildren were yet to be realized. Like an uncharted island chain over a distant horizon, we were unable to imagine them.

Their arrival now seems fated, but no one knows in advance the mind of God.

I was 37 on Nov. 25, 1982.

Orange Coast College’s football team hosted archrival Golden West that day at noon in the schools’ annual turkey day classic. I worked the game as OCC’s sports information director.

Though we lost, it didn’t put a damper on the Carnett family Thanksgiving. The day was glorious. At 3 p.m. I left OCC’s campus and joined my family for dinner at my parents’ Costa Mesa home.

In addition to my immediate family and my parents, attendees included my brother and his wife and their two children, and my sister and her husband and infant son. There were 15 of us around the dining room table. My parents had expanded the room several years earlier for just such a gathering.

The meal consisted of turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce, my wife’s delicious sweet potato pie, my sister’s special vegetable dish — and lots of conversation. We concluded with coffee and mom’s cherry pie.

Before the first bite, as was our custom, I said the blessing.

I don’t remember what I said, but it should have been something like: “Lord, help us to appreciate life as we live it. Your blessings are much too wonderful.”

Thanks, Emily, for planting a seed.

Happy Thanksgiving!

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.