Not Ordinary at All

The Boston Herald

Yesterday marked the beginning, once again, of 'Ordinary Times.' I noticed the reappearance of the words in church Sunday, a phrase I pondered last summer when the term leaped out and struck me as if I were hearing it for the first time.

The words startled me, affronted me almost back then, because I didn't believe that August, summer's finest month, was in any way ordinary.

And yet upon reflection I came to realize it is. It's ordinary that in New England the first week of August is the apex of summer. It's ordinary that it's marked by hot, lazy days and warm, lazy nights. It's ordinary that the ocean heats up and people chill out. It's ordinary to hear crickets and car radios. August shrinking into fall is ordinary. Day curling into night.

Rain, fog, snow, ice, sunshine, the stars, the sun, the moon, the oceans, rivers - all these things are ordinary. I liked this notion of paying attention to the ordinary. I liked the idea of the church dedicating most of its calendar, not to special events, but to what is commonplace. It seemed a wake-up call, somehow. It seemed to put the ordinary and the extraordinary on the same plane.

But despite this new awareness, the ordinary got forgotten sometime in late fall, at least by me. Maybe it hid in the background of my consciousness, like music, like the TV always on, like being able to breathe or walk or talk, like so many simple-complex things that are all small miracles, they get overlooked. I forgot about them despite my resolve. It's so easy to forget the ordinary. It's quiet and steady like electricity, not dazzling and sporadic like lightning, so you tend not to notice it.

You tend to take the ordinary for granted Heat pumping through the vents; glass windows that keep the cold out but let the world in; car engines that start; a kettle boiling; beef stew; the news at 11; a hot shower, the morning paper; coffee. Unheralded, -- unimpressive, almost invisible, sometimes, boring, ordinary routine. And yet, churches urge that we pay attention. Count your blessings, is how my mother used to put it. Stop and smell the roses is the secular phrase.

However you say it, it seems imperative now, in the midst of this deep freeze, surrounded by mounds of snow, life harder than it has been in a long while, but still good, that we take note of all the ordinary-extraordinary things that insulate us from the cold and the snow and the hardships of winter.

Last winter in Sarajevo, people were forced to burn furniture to keep warm. This year they have no furniture left and no wood they can get to, snipers picking them off when they leave their homes. They have no food, either, the convoys carrying supplies being shot at, too. And so in a city that was once more worldly than Boston, ordinary people are freezing and starving to death.

Less than two years ago these people lived the ordinary times that we are living now. They would get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up again. It didn't seem much to celebrate. But it is.

That's the message of ordinary times. Notice them. Give thanks for them. Protect them. For they are only ordinary so long as they last.