An extraordinary ordinary day

Saturday was by most measures an ordinary day for us.

By that, I mean it was not an extraordinary day. Within our realm, things happened that typically happen on a summer Saturday.

And yet when I stopped for a moment at the end of the day to itemize in my mind how the day had passed, as I often do, I marveled.

At Farmers Market, as we sold the kids’ weekly inventory of banana bread, we saw old friends and met new ones. Holly wandered merrily around the market with our next door neighbor – they are back on peaceable terms after an unfortunate rift earlier in the summer – and used her banana bread profits to buy earrings and dog biscuits. I bought corn picked that same morning along with three different colors of tomatoes, a large bunch of basil, and a bag of fingerling potatoes. When the market ended, I chopped the tomatoes to make a salsa.

Holly and I had errands to do in the afternoon; we drove several miles on a superhighway and returned home safely. Ordinary. And yet also remarkable. Late in the afternoon, I ran four and a half miles. Ordinary for me, and yet remarkable that I’m blessed with the physical wellness to be able to do this.

Every facet of our day, when I stop to contemplate it, shares this duality: ordinary, and yet extraordinary. Ordinary in that it’s typical for us; extraordinary in that who are we to be so blessed?

Later in the evening we went to a restaurant where we were served far more food than we needed. People in our own country and all around the world starve, but we sent back half our bread basket and took home leftovers from our entrees. Back home, Tim called us from Maine to say he was having fun with his grandparents: he’d gone boating all afternoon and eaten lobster rolls for dinner. How is it possible that we inhabit an existence in which this is ordinary?

All of it seems astonishing to me, when examined. Friends at Farmers Market and abundant food on the table and safe highway travels and strong happy children. Fresh tomatoes. Walls and a roof. Bacitracin for a cut Holly incurred. Books piled on the nightstand, all the books we could possibly want.

This feeling is what I think memoirist Katrina Kenison calls “The Gift of an Ordinary Day,” the title of her last book. The sense of wonder we can take from what is remarkable simply because it happens to us, undeserved and unsurprising. This is what I missed most in the days after September 11th: ordinary days, days filled with aspects both lovely and routine, so easy to overlook, but at the same time begging to be admired, like the brilliant zinnias and the red and orange tomatoes at Farmers Market.

An ordinary day. Undeserved and yet granted to me anyway. I’m blessed with this magnificent reality, and all I can do is wonder at it.