The Glory of the Everyday

Years ago, we hosted for Shabbat dinner an American couple who were visiting Jerusalem. In those days, guests would usually join us a our table on Friday evening, and sometimes these would include strangers. Perhaps a mutual friend had given them our name and telephone number. Perhaps we had acceded to the request, by one of the associations to which we belonged, to host visitors. I don't remember how this couple came to us, but we had not met them before, and we never saw them again.

This was not, however, the end of our relationship. The husband sends us a card each year for Chanukah, on which he inscribes, in careful lettering, one or more quotations. In addition, he sometimes sends excerpts from books he's reading. I respond to these in a letter of thanks, and over the years a correspondence arose between us. Eventually, we became epistolary friends.

This year his Chanukah card contains three quotations, one of which, from Garth Stein, is striking: To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live my life. This is a powerful idea and one more useful than the admonition to live each day as if it were out last. As the poet Billy Collins has pointed out, if we were to treat each day as our last, we would not bother to repair the roof, and our friends and relations would soon tire of our farewells. But if we viewed each day as stolen from death, we could hope to steal a few more and in the meantime we would savor each moment. The everyday activities and interactions that we take for granted, ordinary life, in short - preparing supper, eating it with one's family, washing the dishes - would become precious.

Our friend's quotation is poignant, because he is a rare survivor, four years after its discovery, of pancreatic cancer. Only 24% of its victims survive the first year after its diagnosis, and only 5% survive for five years. This year our friend suffered several hospitalizations, endured heroic treatments, including liver chemoembolization (don't ask), and almost died. Nonetheless, each time he's released from the hospital, he maintains as normal a routine as possible, going to his office every day and traveling frequently with his only child, a high school baseball star, to the team's playoffs all over the country. He hope now to attend his kid's high school graduation this June.

Not for our friend reclining under a palm tree or visiting exotic locales. No, he's living his everyday life. In an earlier post, I wrote of Emily Webb in Our Town. As a ghost she revisits her home on the morning of her twelfth birthday and tries to talk to her parents, who can neither see nor hear her, as they go about preparing for the day. The everyday life she so longs for, taken for granted while she was alive, now seems achingly precious. When she returns to the graveyard, she asks the Town Manager, Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute? And he replies, No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some. It's a good bet that our friend has joined the company of saints and poets in at least one respect, in experiencing the wonder and the glory of the everyday.