She cut my jumper cables to make me a teacher
By: Paul Keane
Tags: Education, Apprenticeship, High School, Teaching

A scene from Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner

Miss Wilder and my parents chat at the Wilder Commemorative, 1985.

In 1975 another voice would begin whispering in my right ear “Settle down. Don’t soil your own nest with activism” It was the voice of Miss Isabel Wilder, my friend for 20 years until her death in 1995 and the sister of the American author, Thornton Wilder.

Here is her 1986 letter to me after my mother had died, stranded in an Oregon ICU 3000 miles from her Hamden, Connecticut home on life support machinery fully conscious for 118 days. It was a nightmare of medical ethics.

Miss Wilder was underwriting my six month internship to become a Vermont English teacher when she wrote me the following letter in 1986. It was a ‘cut-the apron strings’ letter, except that my mother was already dead and Miss Wilder was addressing my relationship with my father; so it was more a ‘cut the jumper cables’ letter than apron strings.

In 1990 she and my father would underwrite the first year of my M.A. at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, where Miss Wilder had been a student herself in the 1920’s.

She told me when I was accepted at Bread Loaf in 1990 that “there was a poet of the day in residence at that time[ 1920’s at Bread Loaf]”.

The poet of the day was Robert Frost. Only the sister of an author who won three Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award could dismiss Robert Frost as “a poet of the day”.

My father would die in 1992 and Miss Wilder in 1995, at the age of 95.

The graduation ceremony in 1997 had a sadness to it for me when I realized the older generation in my life was falling away.

Thornton Wilder wrote a one act play about that theme, The Long Christmas Dinner, which the Sterling Professor of English at Yale called “the most beautiful one act play written in the English language”.

It may be beautiful to read but it is impossible to stage. The play calls for a huge dining room table in the middle of the stage around which three generations of the Bayard family sit for decades of a Christmas dinner. They fall away as they age and the seats are filled like elegant slow motion musical chairs with new generations of family members who are born and age and move up, and go to war or die in childbirth or simply leave home, and of course grow old and die.

Falling away and moving up. That pretty much sums up the choreography of humanity on our tiny globe doesn’t it?

Pretty much.

My turn is coming up.

Paul Keane

White River Junction, Vermont November 18, 2020

October 8, 1986

Dear Paul,

I’ve had a series of nice little notes from you and I have a few comments to make. Some of these notes are happy and others are from the dumps. I’m going to talk turkey. I have been very unwell and not out of the house for weeks. The Sunday afternoon you were here and tried to call me I had turned off the telephone and was trying to get some sleep. I’ve even been to the hospital in an ambulance and back and spent four days in our Med Center which is the pits: Only Dickens could have thought of it. “You’ve heard me quote Thornton: “Everybody has a right to their own troubles!” One must never forget that this is all too true. They come in different sizes, shapes and colors and what one can bear easily, another finds extra heavy. Now as for these ups and downs and screams of depression, that’s all aprt of the human burden and you must not feel lonely that you suffer them. Look at it this way, I cannot afford a depression. AND YOU CAN’T!

Of course it’s very difficult for your father in this situation, but what is new about it? Have you forgotten that even before your mother’s illness and death, you had a scare of your father’s health and it seemed very likely that he would slip away or become a chronic invalid then. Now it seems likely that he will either have a major attack or go on for months or years with these lesser, but these frightening and upsetting, upheavals. Great or small, you will be called as the nearest relative and will do what you can. This means you will have to be four-square on your own two feet and take the blow. This means you will have to control yourself. You can’t exhaust yourself with emotional indulgences or finding easy excuses. If it is not clear to your father that you are involved in a commitment most important for your own life and future, you should not waste a minute in making clear to him what you can do as a son and FIND OUT AND MAKE AN UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN YOU TWO OF WHAT HE EXPECTS OF YOU after all these years of not knowing what he has to give as a father and expects to receive from an ignored, until now, son.

I told you I was going to talk turkey and I hope you are reading this in the spirit of my loyal friendship and best wishes for your predicament that has come to a head and blown wide open. You must not forget that you gave a whole year out of your life to be with your mother. You could do it because you had accepted no other of the regular responsibilities of a grown man with wife and family, etc. I think you realize that another person couldn’t have flung up their daily life and did what you did nor did you realize that most mothers would have expected a son to carry on and build his own life plan for a solid future. Now you have the chance for that and before the intervention now of this not surprising necessity of your father’s condition you were on the way to a patterned, important solid plan of life. Please do not get discouraged., and please do not let what seems this good opportunity slip through your hands. Your Mrs. O’Donnell sounds like a wonderfully generous, warm, intuitive person. She sounds truly like someone out of a better world. Please accept this in the spirit in which I have written it.

(Hand-written in margin): Carry on ! I am pretty bearing up right here with eyes can’t address frightful problem & so much to do. Courage.

Love, Isabel

Don’t even THINK unemployed . APRIL — you will & must be as substitute to start.