The Ordinary Moments of 2014

I am here now, sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom, a few days before the new year.  My back leaning against my bed, my feet stretched out in front of me, my left ankle resting on the right. Downstairs, my siblings are watching a marathon viewing of the Harry Potter movies and giggling at the videos on their phones. My mom is making a turkey chili out of the Weight Watchers cookbook and doubling the recipe, while my dad unscrews all of the dead light bulbs and replaces them with ones that are alive.

Christmas is over. We are tired and dehydrated. We are lounging. We are allowing the year to wrap up.

My Dad gave me a calendar for Christmas, each month featuring its own inspirational quote. The quote I’m thinking about most is by Magdalen Nabb, and it reads: “Never get so fascinated by the extraordinary that you miss the ordinary.”

It’s a statement that’s hard to live out, and even more so a the end of the year, when we have a time frame for calculating our joys and regrets and get a little drunk on the hope that comes with starting again. For me, it’s been a year where life on its surface stayed pretty much the same. I live in the same apartment, work at the same job and follow the same schedule. But in the spirit of this calendar quote, here’s for not searching for those extraordinary progressions. Here’s for the ordinary moments, the ones that come without trophies or pay raises, the ones that for whatever reason, I’ll tuck away.

January 4^th: In Logan Airport with my whole family, our plane delay headed into its fourth hour. We sat there antsy; ready to take off for the first tropical vacation we’d had together in fifteen years. This was the first day in what would be a span of the polar vortex—record-breaking cold, snowstorms and under-rested flight crews. We had no idea when and if our plane would take off.  Some of us sent out Snap Chats, some of us read magazines, and some of us stared at the crowds of people pacing around and lugging carry-on bags. The woman sitting next to us tapped my mom on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me! You have the most beautiful family.” We all looked up at her, and then at each other. We smiled, blushed and laughed. My mom said, “Aw, thank you! That’s so nice of you to say!”

June 7^th: It was my first time on a ferry as an adult, headed toward Martha’s Vineyard, for a weekend with my roommate and her parents. Even at the beginning of June, with the wind blowing off of the ocean, the air was hot enough to warm my bare shoulders. I had too much luggage—boxes of strawberries and doughnut-shaped peaches, a few bottles of wine, etc. It took a while to find a place for it all. I was reading Alice McDermott’s Someone and loving it, learning about the smells of Brooklyn in the early 50’s and that the key to a successful funeral home was the presence of a beautiful young woman in a conservative dress greeting the mourners. Next to me, two middle-aged men who had not expected to run into each other chatted about their wives, their work and their weekend. After a few moments, one of them got up to say goodbye, and headed to the other end of the boat. The one who was left pulled his sunglasses from his forehead to his nose and spent the rest of the ride looking at the ocean with a subtle grin.

July 11^th: We celebrated Jen’s bachelorette at the maid-of-honor’s parent’s house in East Hampton, New York. By the time we started to make dinner, we were already buzzed. It was a summer meal with many parts: grilled chicken and shrimp, pasta salad, roasted vegetables and some kind of sauce. A handful of us wandered around the kitchen, slowly figuring out where to fit in. “Why don’t you cook the spinach for the pasta salad?” someone asked me. I agreed. We had two bags of it and a bottle of olive oil. Using a wooden spoon, I added and stirred, feeling the heat rising and hitting my hand. Someone else sliced the zucchini and someone else spread a mix of spices over the shrimp.  When it was all done, we all sat down and ate it together, a little winded, a little closer than we were before. 

October 6^th: It was a blind date on a Monday, and neither of us had set a specific time. When I left my house I texted him with a twenty-minute warning, and I arrived to an almost empty bar. He said he’d be along soon, so I ordered a drink that the bartender recommended, and read a bit of my book. Then my phone vibrated with a text that read: “I’m here.” I turned around to see a guy walk in, looking for someone, and walking toward the other end of the bar. Must be him, I thought. I had the bartender call him over. He was cute. We hugged and he sat on the stool next to me, and asked me about my day. Then he said, “Your hair… it’s so much lighter than it looked in your picture.” I tuck a strand of it behind my ear. “Well,” I said, “that picture was taken last winter.” He nodded, and then mentioned how surprised he was to learn that we both liked Tool. My face must have made it clear that I didn’t know who Tool was.  That was when I learned that his name was not Matt, and he learned that my name was not Annie. We laughed. He took off, leaving the seat for my actual date.

October 10^th: Most locals don’t go to dinner until 10 or so, Abby, my sister, mentioned, but since it was our first night in Rome she made the reservation for 8.  She claimed that was exhausted the day that she first got there, so she figured we would be too. The restaurant came recommended to her for its Carbonara. It was small and set on the first floor of an apartment building across from the Tiber River. We were the first ones there. When the hostess saw us, she asked: “Abby?” We nodded, she directed us to our table, and we sat down. There was something about that moment of walking in, to a little place my sister had researched and selected and called ahead to claim our seats, in a foreign city that she had learned how to get around in. We traveled far to see her, and she would, with these small efforts and grace, take care of us.

Halfway There

It has been rainy and gray for the past few days in New England, and I have yet to buy an umbrella. In multiple places—the radio, the lunchroom, the check-in counter at the gym, people have said: “Thank GOD it’s not snow!”

A few days ago the little blue advent book that I picked up at the back of a church in Back Bay told me that the season is now half over. It instructed me to think about the goals I’d made for myself at the beginning, review my plan, and sit for six minutes in silence and think about how it’s going.

I have friends who are very goal-oriented. They set one goal, and sketch out the steps required to reach that goal, and chip away at it for days and months and years. Later they’ll say things like: “I ran that marathon in 4 hours and 30 minutes!”; “I opened that hair salon where people now must book their appointment three months advance!”; “I got a book deal!” It’s easy to get jealous of these human versions of y = mx + b; the stories of promotions and the house closing dates; the sight of someone’s glass Tupperware collection neatly organized.

Life road-map construction and following does not come naturally for me. My mind creates two or three goals, with several potential pathways to success, and then bounces from one to the other whenever I get frustrated. I think of the pain associated with each stepping stone, of mud-soaked boots and potential rejections, of crowds standing on the sidelines asking themselves: “What is she doing?”

Maybe, at least for Advent, it’s a time when we aren't meant to have a specific end-destination. Or get frustrated about the ways our lives are and are not unfolding. It's a time to be quiet and stay still. To stop questioning the amount of money we make, the relationship we may or may not be in, the way our apartment would look if we could only buy that West Elm rug. Maybe Advent is when we can practice telling ourselves, over and over, like Mary must have during her pregnant journey to Bethlehem, that God is with us. Maybe Advent is just enough time to allow ourselves to realize that it’s true.

So instead of making a grand plan and a never-ending list of festive aspirations, I committed myself to six minutes every night to sit in my bed and write about my day without any specific intention. To feel the warmth of my house, hear the sound of the cars going by, the see the dark, spidery shadows the telephone wires cast on the street outside my window.

We are all moving down certain paths, with or without a road map in hand. All we can do is step back for a few minutes, consider the sticks that we tripped over, and remember those who pulled over and offered a ride.