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A Prayer for Everyday Things

There’s a secular kind of prayer I make when I fear something in my life is about to be lost. It goes like this: Please, please, please, please.

On an everyday basis, that thing is my phone and I am asking the Maker (of Apple Products) to reveal it to me as not lost after all. Please, please, please, please, I think. And there it is: my phone, tossed heedlessly into my bag, hidden in the black recesses among sundry other black things. I feel a little spangle of relief; it’s a company-issued phone, and I simply can’t tell the tech-support guy I lost another one. On most occasions, I remember to send up a thank you to the Maker that goes something like this: “You have saved me so much inconvenience (not to mention groveling) on this day, and for that I am grateful.”

As a mother of two “children” now in their 20s, I’ve had far too many occasions to send up that prayer to another Maker, who, although not well known to me, probably doesn’t reside in Cupertino.

Please, please, please, please, I thought as I pounded the playground looking for a lost Lily, who was not over by the swings, not underneath the life-size concrete hippos and not where I last saw her at the teeter-totters before I fell into a conversation with Amy Barr — complaining about our kids, in all likelihood. When Lily is found — trolling for food from the sanctimonious mom who always remembers to bring baggies of raisins and Goldfish — I don’t care that Mother Superior gives me a side-eyed look for losing my daughter and having no snacks. I send up a thank-you to Whomever for restoring Lily to me, for making this day a perfectly ordinary one. I remember, at least in that moment, to stop wishing that extraordinary things would happen to me (“Hey lady, you look like a novelist! Got a book we can publish?”) and appreciate just how sweet ordinary life can be.

Thank you, I think, brushing the Goldfish dust from Lily’s round cheeks. I will never complain about my children again.

I remember, at least in that moment, to stop wishing that extraordinary things would happen to me, and appreciate just how sweet ordinary life can be.

Fast-forward many years, and Oliver, Lily’s younger brother, has offered to drive to Vermont to pick up his sister from college. It is Thanksgiving break, and we are too cheap/broke to fly her home. As darkness is falling, some five hours after he should have arrived, Lily calls from Vermont to say, “No Oliver.” I try his phone, which goes straight to voicemail, but I don’t really worry until Lily calls two hours later with the same message: “No Oliver.”

I try to go about my ordinary activities, shopping for the holiday, but my brain is scrambled with anxiety and the grocery store is making me more nuts than usual: the bafflingly numerous choices when it comes to buttermilk, the throngs of shoppers in that supermarket-stupor of torpid movement, the grocery baggers in their grating Santa hats (it’s Thanksgiving people! If you feel you must wear a holiday topper, why not a pilgrim’s hat?). I am blinded by visions of Oliver, all of them catastrophic: car crashed into a tree; or car out of gas and he’s walking down the road accosted by a crazy person or forced to sleep in the car, temperature plummeting; his vehicle black by the side of the black roadway, an obstacle the other car can’t see until … and so forth.

Please, please, please, please, I think, praying, in my way, for my ordinary life to resume. And it does, with an annoyed Oliver calling from a gas station up by the Canadian border, having missed his exit, having had his cell phone die, having had to listen to ten (he: “Seriously, mom, ten?”) increasingly frantic messages from me. The next day, I am still weak with relief over having both my children — and many other people I love — around the table. And even though the turkey is on the dry side and the gravy is on the thin side and the biscuits are a little weird (wrong buttermilk) and the cranberry relish is hated by all, I couldn’t be more grateful when my guests compliment me on the lovely meal.

“Thank you,” I say to them and also to Whomever. “Thank you so much.”

(Photo credit: Stocksy.com)

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