The Ordinary Is the Extraordinary

I wrote in the previous post about my weekend in the lap of luxury and how much fun it was. Today? Back to normal, ordinary life. I’ve just wasted some time trying to find a couple of quotations that I wanted to include in this post but decided it just wasn’t necessary. Let’s just get on with the ordinary day!

Any number of people have written about their lack of appreciation for the mundane until it’s over. Normal life is going on without their paying much attention, and then it stops. Maybe it’s something that just happens in the normal course of things: the last child goes off to school, or leaves home. The aging process moves along until one day you realize you can’t do something you always took for granted. You forget to water the new bushes and they die. (Not that that has ever happened to me!)

But sometimes it’s more dramatic. I was reminded of Cornelius Ryan, the author of such books as The Longest Day, the classic book on D-Day, and how he said of his cancer diagnosis that the phone rang and suddenly his life changed. He knew he was going to die. We had the same experience with our son, the phone call, anyway. As I’ve said recently, he’s doing well. (Last night he got an e-mail from a grad school where he applied; they want to have a phone interview with him tomorrow or Wednesday. He’s not in yet, but at least he’s gotten beyond the point of just rejection letters, which is what happened last year. We are cautiously hopeful!) I can remember vividly (and wrote about in a separate blog back when this all happened) the afternoon in May of 2014 (the 14th, to be exact) at 4:30 when the phone rang in our house and it was the rheumatologist we had seen earlier that week because of an idea that Gideon’s symptoms were caused by a rare form of arthritis. He had sent Gideon for an MRI, and now the results were in. “Well, we know now why he’s in such pain,” he said. “He has tumors on his spine.” I remember looking at my watch: 4:30 PM. I thought, ‘This is when our lives changed.’

But today isn’t a day like that. It’s ordinary. I still haven’t taken my walk. The kitchen is kind of messy. I haven’t unpacked my suitcase. It’s 3:30 and I don’t have much planned in the way of dinner, although I did at least take some chicken out of the freezer. Yesterday my husband and I were in downtown Denver at the Home and Garden Show. We went out for lunch at this historic old place on the 16th Street Mall. It was a special day. We really enjoyed ourselves. But today is . . . ordinary. Except that it isn’t. One observation that many people make when their lives are upended: How much they would give to have just one ordinary day back again, one day when they cleaned up messes and fed children and went to work. One day that at the time seemed like every other day, one that would be a part of an endless progression–until it wasn’t.

So I’d encourage you to think about your ordinary days. And if you haven’t done so (this is the last time I’ll nag about this, I promise), please read the 10-part series called “Afton’s Story” over on the cooking blog Pinch of Yum. I was prodded to write this post by her last one, which was a description of the ordinary day she and her husband had before she went in for a routine exam and found out that she was going into premature labor, the ordinary day when they were working on the blog and planning the nursery, still thinking that they were having a baby in April.  Read it here: “The Normal Day.”