A Celebration of Ordinary Days

I could begin this blog post in a number of places.  I could tell you about watching The Great Escaper Sunday night with incandescent performances from 89-year-old Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson just months before her death.  While each of them captures some of the challenges of being old, they also make it ordinary. They and their director don't try to 'tart up' being old. There are walkers, canes, wheelchairs, angina and missing meds. "This is just what happens if you are lucky," Caine and Jackson seem to say.  And while Michael Caine's character, Bernard Jordan, undertakes an inventive and intrepid trip to the 70th Anniversary celebrations of D-Day, it is his wife, Irene, who utters the healing words about how he came back from the war with a dark secret, but he spent every minute of every day showing his love for her with ordinary words and gestures. 

Those same ordinary words and gestures influence his remarkable understanding of the people he meets on his journey, prompting me to say to Bill last night "Love makes us wise." Irene's loving habits extend to her young caregiver, whom she says is better than her job and so needs to dream. The ordinary observations we have about the people we love, the ordinary, loving gestures we practice day after day, subtly keep us alive to the larger ideas of connection and relationship. They keep judgment at bay and curiosity at play, making us open to our complex humanity.  Thus, the ordinariness of love makes us wise.

Or I could tell you about Bill's and my relaxed ordinary day yesterday that included a search for new oven mitts (our old ones are falling apart),  a trip to the bookstore, afternoon tea, and an evening movie, and to say what a wonderful antidote it was to my relentless and restless push to accomplish something every day. Over tea, I watched wave after wave of geese fly overhead.  It's such an ordinary thing, something they do year after year, badly at first, until they've flown enough times off south to fields with enough dropped grain to get better at organizing themselves in vees. 

The ordinary day let me simply wonder why I loved them so.  I know what their departure means: winter and even darker days are on the horizon.  Yet I find something inspiring about their rehearsals. Like the geese, you can noisily embrace those moments when you are between this and that, here and there. You can rehearse some of the more eventful challenges of life, getting ready in steps that are themselves kind of exciting. New, at least. (I'm thinking of old age and death a lot these days, for various legitimate reasons, but I'm nowhere near getting alarmed or worried.  I'm curious, mostly, and the geese help. (No, that parenthesis that isn't closed is not a typo.)

Or I could give you several lines out of Medrie Purdham's remarkable poem, "Rowan, We Are Ordinary," inspired by bringing her newborn son home:

Rowan, we are ordinary

ordinary in the knot of time, under the powder moon, in the redolent grass;                                                                             

ordinary in the uncanny houses, the dreamed ones with mahogany and the moving swells under the rug; 

As her images and word choices suggest, she has an imaginative, resonant, even uncanny way of describing ordinariness.  In a sense, this perfectly illustrates the paradox of the poem's situation.  What could be more ordinary than mother and child, than bringing a baby home from the hospital?  It happens all the time.  But never the same way twice, never with the same sensibilities or emotional valences.  Thus she captures both how ordinary and how absolutely extraordinary the birth of a child and its homecoming are.  The poem is a gift to us all, parents or not, because it reveals how much poetry lies beneath our everyday lives.

Or I might re-interpret Annie Dillard's creed that "How you live your days is how you live your life."  In the past, I've often seen this philosophy as a prompt to get important stuff done every day.  Or when Oliver Burkeman reminds us that we only have 4,000 weeks, I think that I'd best decide what I really want to accomplish and jettison all the other stuff on my list. But where is the place for wonder, for awe in such a life?  Doesn't wonder often happen when we're wool-gathering, between here and there, this and that?  Houses look more vulnerable with all their protective greenery gone to ground, and the soft lights of the early dark, before we close the curtains, remind me, as I drive to the grocery store, that each house has its story, its narrative.  People live there with desires and fears that drive them to do the unexpected--all of which are probably ordinary yet utterly individual. I want to be gobsmacked by the complexity that I pass by every day, but the complexity is ordinary, and spending time in ordinary ways makes possible these ruminations and reflections.

Re: the photographs.  The first is my upstairs hallway.  I love the juxtaposition of the formal doorways and large ceramic jar and the duck's head umbrella Bill stores there.  The second is simply shadows on a wall--completely ordinary.