Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

— — —

Come outside. You’ve got to see.

I was numb. Painfully numb. It had only been a few hours since, at the edge of morning, we had stood together at my dad’s bedside as he took his last few breaths. The shell of the man I had known all of my life was still just down the hall.

C’mon, you guys. You’ve just got to see it.

After he was gone, we had prayed and cried and leaned on each other, physically and emotionally.

And then we scattered.

My brother had fled north to the pond — Dad’s pond. As the dark of night gave way to the gray of dawn, a startlingly white egret took off from the bank and circled the pond, coming so close to my brother that he could hear the wind in its wings.

I had wandered to the east where I watched the gray give way to purple and then blue and red melting into yellow. The tall prairie grasses were silent as morning arrived in a world without my Dad — a world I had never known and had not expected to encounter for many more years. As the meadowlarks and mourning doves called to their mates, the sun broke over the horizon.

My aunt disappeared down the lane to the south. My husband headed northwest into the prairie. My mom stayed with his body. She insisted on bathing him for the last time by herself.

Morning arrived bright and clear. Slowly the light drove our worn bodies back into the house.

You are not going to believe this.

She wasn’t going to give up. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. The others followed.

She led us across the front yard and behind the tall pines that whispered in the breeze of a brilliant October morning. She led us toward the shed where Dad’s toys — a ski boat, the RV and his tractors — were housed. She veered to right and kept walking until we passed Dad’s woodworking shop where he had created detailed doll houses for his granddaughters, where he and his sons had spent hours completing any number of projects, where his own father’s woodworking tools now resided. And we kept walking until we rounded the corner at the back of the shop.

Look, my Dad’s sister whispered.

A small patch was left unmown right behind the shop and, in that wild space, bronze tall grasses and lavender prairie flowers had flourished. Milkweed and musk thistle moved gently in the breeze. But that slight movement could not account for all that was in motion.

Butterflies perched and clustered on every plant. A Mourning Cloak fluttered over the tiny patch of meadow and a Painted Lady or two danced on the breeze. Monarchs chased each other over our heads. Yellow Sulphurs and Wood Nymphs lazily flitted from one flower to the next. A Zebra Swallowtail and a cloud of Red Admirals joined the crowd. At least a hundred butterflies had congregated along the back wall of the shop.

The four of us stood, slack jawed, in awe.

My Dad died of ALS. I knew nothing of the disease before he told us of his diagnosis. This is not what I would have chosen, but this is the hand I have been dealt and I will play it, he wrote to his children and his sister just after the initial diagnosis. A trip to the Mayo Clinic in January made the death sentence official.

ALS slowly leaches the ability to move from its victims. First he lost fine motor skills in his legs and then his arms and hands. He lost the ability to feed himself. He couldn’t breathe as deeply, so speaking became difficult. He lost gross motor skills. He lost the ability to turn his head, to nod yes or no. In the end, all he could do was blink. But the disease does not impair the mind. As his body slowly went limp, he was excruciatingly aware of what was happening.

We were told we had three to five years. We were given only 10 months.

We laughed and we joked and we adapted to the changes that we saw every week. We teased and we cherished and we cried all 10 of those months. We carried on just as we always have. Nothing was so awful that we couldn’t laugh. In August, after my sister-in-law’s double lung transplant, she and Dad exchanged pictures via e-mail… a grinning but pale Karlene with all of her prescription bottles in front of her appeared on Dad’s computer screen and, via Mom, he fired back a picture of himself… with what was left of his smile behind the drug bottles arranged in two rows on the tray of his motorized wheelchair. When his speech became so garbled that we couldn’t understand, we worked at learning how to quickly narrow down the possibilities: Does it begin with a B? A D? A P? A T? A V? We learned to anticipate when he needed us to spread his fingers on the arm of his chair so they wouldn’t cramp. Eventually, when the difference between a nod and shake became indistinguishable, we even communicated through a new language… one blink for no and two deliberate blinks for yes.

In the end, we were grateful for those 10 months — for the warning that came both too early and too late.

When we have done all the work we were sent to do, we are allowed to shed our bodies, which imprison our soul like a cocoon encloses the butterfly and when the time is right we can let go of it. Then we will be free of pain, free of fears and free of worries — free as a beautiful butterfly returning home to God…. —Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Dad died on October 2. As his friends and family slowly arrived for his memorial service a week later, the butterflies continued to gather, too. More every day until thousands of butterflies covered his 37 acres of Kansas prairie. They fluttered and danced and lifted our spirits. After his memorial service, those who came by the house were mesmerized by their vast numbers and sheer beauty.

Throughout the following week, family members returned to their homes and their lives. Relatives from across Kansas loaded into their cars and departed. My cousins left for Michigan. The number of butterflies in the fields dwindled. My youngest brother and his children returned to Arizona. My mom’s sister headed back to Topeka and the five of us were again alone. By the time we parted company at the end of the week, the butterflies were gone and the weather turned cold.

Two years have passed, and they have not returned.

This may seem like an odd entry for a site dedicated to finding the beauty, the peace, the blessing in the moment, but I’ve never felt more blessed than in the moments I spent out in that field photographing and cavorting with the butterflies. They sometimes landed in my hair or settled on my shoulder as I tried to capture their beauty. At a time of great sadness, at a time when the cloth of my life had suffered a huge rent, I found peace and comfort and the tools I needed to mend while I sat alone in a crowded field.

Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

— — —

My dad loves all aspects of fatherhood, but I think his favorite is scaring his children.

As a young man, Dad was a prankster. He has countless stories of playing tricks on his brothers and friends as a teenager and twentysomething. As a dad, Dad had a few more things in his favor: His victims were young, innocent and believed everything he said. Also, “The X-Files” was on when all but I were of prime scaring age. Our TV was in the basement, which was unfinished in the ’90s. The basement had a cement floor, was freezing cold and its back room had several creepy closets, including one with the furnace and pipes that quivered and made abrupt noises.

Dad proved to be adept at mimicking the sounds of the X-Files monsters, a skill he loved to employ as my siblings would be trembling up the stairs to go to bed. One night he mock-rampaged up behind them, making the sound of the Fiji mermaid, a monster that sounded like a cross between a banshee and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. After that, they were scared to go into the basement and upstairs, leaving just one-third of the house fear-free. Luckily, it was the third with the kitchen.

But monsters were nothing next to doctors. Dad is famous for the line he’d utter whenever one of us would have to go to the doctor. “They take a needle THIS long,” he’d say, holding his index fingers about a foot apart, “and as thick as a pencil.” Here he’d pause, re-emphasize the imaginary needle with his fingers, and speak slowly: “And they stick it … right … in … your … eye.”*

The doctor thing was classic, but Dad’s legacy is his stories. He has a knack for describing things to kids with captivating brevity and such simple but compelling language that they completely understand and are petrified. I remember being at dinner and him pointing to a plate and saying that in Africa, in banana trees, there were spiders that big, which would jump out at banana pickers. He didn’t even need to say “RIGHT IN THEIR FACES,” because he knew that the picture we had in our heads was of some cheery farmchild reaching up for bananas and a fierce werewolf of a spider leaping on his head and sucking out his blood in two gulps, probably through his eye.

Dad’s warning before we went to the pool used a different kind of fear. “Water. Doesn’t. Care,” he would say — and that was all, a little seed of a warning. But on the way to the pool it had time to grow, and by the time we got there, we imagined cruel, uncaring water rushing around a flailing, shrieking child — and suddenly, the deep end didn’t seem like such a good idea.

And that was just the nonfiction. His top two bedtimes stories were “The Man in the Wall,” about a person who becomes a homicidal maniac after his construction buddies brick him into a wall; and “The Witch of Eastborough Lake,” whose title character kidnaps children and keeps them in her underwater palace.

I thought that I was a lot better than that, that I had evolved. Then one day a student pointed to a switch. “Can I turn off the light?” she asked.

“No,” I said. And then it fell out of my mouth: “I don’t want the zombies to come out.”

She laughed, but a little nervously. “Zombies?”

“Oh yeah, as soon as you turn off the light, they pour in through the vent,” I said, tapping the metal slats. “And then they collect in a pool on the floor and rise up as zombies, but by then I’m usually out of here.”

She wanted it to be a joke, but her face was hesitating. She was scared.

“That’s why, if you ever see me leave, I lock the door and run,” I said. “Now, here, let’s color.”

*Tables really turned on Pops, though, when he had a (don’t worry, benign) brain tumor a few years ago and endured a footlong syringe before surgery.

Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

— — —

It started out as a joke more than anything. I found it on the free table at work — where books, beauty products, chocolate and random promotional items are left for people to fight over or ignore. The postcard is actually ugly: a pea green card with a thick marigold frame. And the words. The worst part. They’re in Times New Roman Italic (I don’t know anyone who celebrates anything in Times New Roman, Italic or otherwise.) This is, like, the most uncreatively designed postcard ever. But I thought the words — I celebrate your life! — were funny, so I took it.

I kept it in my cube and held it up at unexpected times to my co-workers without saying a word.

You think we should leave work a little early because it’s been a long day?

I celebrate your life!

You have the images I’ve been waiting days for?

I celebrate your life!

You’re going to give the intern all the scanning so that I don’t have to do it? Oh yes.

I certainly celebrate your life!

Eventually, the hilarity wore off, so I pinned the card up in my cube among the staff phone list, pictures of friends and barely legible notes to myself.

Months passed before I thought about the phrase again. This time it was for a friend’s birthday. What better time to celebrate a person’s life than on her birthday, right? I sent her a birthday-eve e-mail letting her know that I was celebrating her 25 years of existence (and that my present had not yet been mailed, as I do not celebrate going to the post office).

Less than a week later, my cousin was one of nine students accepted into a highly competitive graduate program. We had agreed that if she got in, we’d splurge on a nice restaurant (the kind we visited when other people picked up the tab). After we’d savored the five-cheese appetizer, I gave my cousin a toast; the gist of it was: Dear cousin, I celebrate your life! Somehow the awkward-yet-genuine phrase was finding its way out of my cubicle.

Once I started genuinely telling people that I celebrated their lives, I couldn’t stop. I’m not sure if people in my life were having more reasons to celebrate or if I was starting to pay better attention.

Shortly after all those celebrations, a friend told me that he was seriously considering quitting his job to start a company with his brother, an idea he’d been toying around with for years but now had the means to pursue. He told me about the preliminary work he’d done and plans for accomplishing everything else. And what did I think of this lofty plan? Dude, I totally celebrate your life. How can you not celebrate the bravery, vision, drive and creativity that it takes to pursue something like that?

And then I started to realize that it shouldn’t be such an exception to take notice and let our friends know that we’re thinking about them. When it comes down to it, we should be celebrating our friends’ lives — and our own — more often. And not just for the standard hoopla of birthdays, school and jobs.

You cooked a new recipe?

I celebrate your life!

After weeks of braving the DMV, you finally got a new license?

I celebrate your life!

I found an error in a hospital bill and was pro-active about contacting the companies so I didn’t have to pay extra for my E.R. visit?

I celebrate my life!

Taking the time to recognize the important or the little or the out-of-the-ordinary doesn’t have to be time consuming or well planned or eloquently stated. It doesn’t have to be on pretty stationery, typo-free with impeccable handwriting. But it does require you to go beyond thinking nice things to actually sharing them. So often I intend to let people know that I’m thinking about them but get sidetracked and forget. If it takes leaving the postcard in my purse and making a copy to tack up in my room, maybe that’s what I need to do to remind myself to celebrate all the wonderful things happening in our lives.

(I just hope I haven’t offended anyone by reusing the same line. If so, it looks like I need to find a new inspirational postcard.)

Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

— — —

I live a busy life.

I rush from moment to moment, always planning ahead, always focusing on a goal. I’ve always been like that. I can’t think of a time in my life when I wasn’t thinking of the next step. The next moment. The next item to check off on my perpetual to-do list. I would say, without a doubt, one of my greatest weaknesses is forgetting that life is constantly swirling all around me while I’m busy making future plans.

Thankfully, sometimes I’m lucky enough to be hit with a moment so stunning that it knocks the breath — and all of my plans — right out of me.

At the bottom of a steep dirt road at a camp in the heart of Texas Hill Country, a sign spells outs odd, if not amusing, directions. Yes! You drive in the river, it reads.

In our case we walked.

Seventy-five screaming, giggly seventh and eighth graders and their chaperones walked straight into the water and up the road to our campsite for a three-day end-of-year camping trip.

Originally, the plan had been to haul the kids through the water on a trailer. The plan changed, and I’m so glad it did.

As we entered the icy water of the Frio River, nearly everyone around me screamed and shouted. In an instant, I was surrounded by giggling and shouting and every other kind of joyful noise I wish I heard out of my students’ mouths more often. Sometimes, teaching in the rough and tumble neighborhood in which I do, it can be hard to remember that at the end of the day, my kids are just that: kids.

Giggling, goofy, joyful kids.

There aren’t really enough words to truly describe the looks on their faces as they walked through the river that day. Every last horrible thing I go through on a daily basis at my school is worth it for being a part of that moment in their lives. As they slipped and slid all over the rocks and clung to hands and arms and anything they could use to stay upright on the slippery rock bottom of the road, I was struck by the awesomeness of it all. For many of these kids, it was their first time ever leaving Houston. For even more of them, it was their first time setting foot in fresh water.

For that one moment, in that 100-yard stretch of water, they were just kids. Not poor kids or troubled kids or delinquents or projects. But for that moment, they were what every person should be at least once in their life: perfectly filled with an overpowering happiness.

And so was I.

Take a kid into a river for the first time in their entire lives or watch their eyes when they look at the stars for the first time without the glare of the city lights and tell me anything in your important, busy life matters. I guarantee that after seeing their faces, it won’t. That walk in the river was one of those moments that if I could just capture it and play it on repeat in my mind for the rest of my life, I would be a better teacher, friend, person. There’s no doubt.

As I followed the last group of kids up the dirt road that led to our campsite, I listened to their laughter disappear over the hill and I stopped and stood in the road smiling and crying, completely stunned by the simple power of the moment.

It’s a very odd thing to realize what it must feel like to be a parent. To be standing on a hill and looking at a group of wet, hysterically happy children and just thank God for that moment. Thank God that they were able to have that moment in their lives and that you got to be there to share it with them. To watch them take it all in. I didn’t realize until right then that I have reached a point in my life where I’ve had enough of these moments to know that, for them, this was one. It’s a memory that will be there through all the ups and downs of the coming years — something to lean on and appreciate when life inevitably gets a little rough.

For all the things I chase in my life and all the moments and relationships and obligations that always seem a little less than perfect, a 100-yard walk through the river was one of the most perfect moments I’ve ever had. What’s more, for all the goals and plans and dreams I’m always chasing after every day, I would not trade one second of that walk for anything. I would not give up a single step for any accolade or achievement.

These are the moments when we’re truly alive. When laughter and holding hands are enough to sustain us through all the bad things that cloud our lives. Maybe if we stop more often and look at the faces of those taking in a first experience — like a walk on a river road — we’ll be better people for it. Maybe, at least for a few seconds, we’ll remember to live in the present because goals and dreams are nice, but what good are any of them if we’re not living the life we’ve got right now? Maybe all the worry and anxiety so many of us carry around can be lightened or even released by the voice of a truly good friend saying I love you or the smile of a stranger on the street or the shouts and laugher of a group of ragtag, messy children.

At least, for my sake, I hope it can.

Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

— — —

It rained last Thursday, which is a statement that wouldn’t be a big deal on the East Coast (my homeland), unless it was followed by something like “and my house washed into the Hudson River.”

But for the first time, I understand, at least in a small way, what it means to live in a drought in a climate that’s really only a step away from being a desert — and to finally get rain. Things are green in Colorado, but it feels forced, like the grass would be much happier to be brown and tough, thank you very much. My first impression of the state (after the mountains, of course) was of reddish rock and dirt and hardy scrubgrass. With more than 300 days of sunshine a year, clouds here are generally a tease. They gather and darken and look threatening, and then they dissipate, at which point someone in my house usually storms into the backyard, looks up at the sky and yells “Just DO it already!”

Because I’m from a climate where it rains fairly often, my gardening skills reflect that expectation. If I forget to water my tomato plants, they’ll be fine. It’ll rain soon. Except then it doesn’t, and my plants become things you can describe with adjectives like “crinkly.” Our neighbors have lawns; we have a dirt patch. I refuse to water grass in a semi-arid climate in draught conditions on principle. My students are embarrassed by this and covertly water the lawn when they think I’m not looking.

This summer has been dry, even for Denver. We’ve had 24 days in a row over 90 degrees, almost all of them sunny. We get teasing sprinkles, a few drops that splatter on the ground and practically sizzle away. We pray in our churches for rain for the fields, and I with my one crinkly tomato plant feel a sudden sympathy for farmers who truly rely on the rain for their living and their sustenance.

Last Thursday, I sat home alone, a few days after my summer community had moved out of the house. The clouds gathered and looked threatening, but they didn’t scatter. A cool wind blew in our open windows. As I lay on the couch journaling, I could hear a drumming sound on our metal awning in the backyard. The awning always makes it sound like it’s raining harder than it actually is, so I didn’t pay attention until the drumbeat got louder and more sustained. Finally, I got up and looked outside — it was pouring like I had never seen it do in Denver, the kind of pour where the rain just becomes a curtain of water. I ran outside excitedly, and quickly ran back inside when I realized how hard it was raining. So I stared hungrily outside the window, watching the water pool in our backyard dirt patch and stream down the driveway. I ran to close the windows at the front of the house, where rain was blowing in sideways and soaking our bookshelf.

It rained for hours, for the rest of the afternoon. The backyard threatened to flood, but the dry ground gulped down the water. At one point, the drumming on the awning became particularly violent and I looked out to see pea-sized hail filling the yard. But in that afternoon, the change was palpable. Everything seemed to be stretching and opening, almost relieved to be able to soak in the moisture. And I shared their relief. For a day, I didn’t have to be outside, doing, watering (or fretting about not watering). I could just sit, and be, and let nature do what I couldn’t to take care of the dry earth. My job was to just sit and soak it in, and let myself get a little less crinkly. I did it gladly.

Editor’s note: for the next two weeks we’ll be running the best of our This Ordinary Day pieces. We’ve enjoyed working with so many great writers and wonderful people and felt it was high time to take a look back at some of what they’ve brought us. If you’d like to see more pieces, please take a trip over to our archives page — it’ll be well worth your time.

— — —

After almost two years, I finally switched my telephone number to a local area code. I’ve lived here long enough, and the novelty of having an out of town number had worn off. It raised a lot of questions and had become more trouble then it was worth. Besides, the nice people at AT&T offered to change it for free when I signed an exclusive 12-year contract.

When I changed my number, I immediately contacted everyone. All my friends, all my clients, they all got e-mails or phone calls letting them know I had altered my contact info. I knew there might be a few mistakes, but weeks went by and everyone seemed ship-shape. Even my parents were dialing the correct sequence.

I should have known not to breathe easy. Problems eventually surface, though not for me. No, the problems were for the poor bastard who got my number. I would later learn that his name is also John. And of course, the one person who ends up calling him is the least civilized.

Nick and I go back many years. He’s also the one guy I wouldn’t want to write my epitaph. We’ve gone through some interesting times and have a keen understanding of one another. When guys reach that level of friendship, they bust each others’ balls.

Nick calls up my phone and gets my voicemail. The recording is different, but the name is still John. So he leaves me a message about how I’m an asshole for not picking up. Since I don’t get the message, he calls again and leaves another. This time he must be in a good mood. This time he talks about what prick I am and something about having sex with my mother. He was probably thinking it was a pretty good message. He was probably thinking there’s no way I could ignore him this time.

But that’s what happened. So Nick, acting on whatever instinct he has, believes this is a calling. He believes that he should just keep up the phone calls until I break my silence. He thinks up fun scenarios, usually involving fucking and some other odd activity before dialing. He calls my number in the evening. He calls between work downtime. He calls from the car. The details of these messages are unknown to me, but I can only imagine their graphic nature. Truth be told, I’d love to see the look on the phone owner’s face when he listens to them.

After two weeks, Nick receives a phone call. The screen says that it’s from me. He answers with some sort of equivalent of “about fucking time” only to hear an unfamiliar voice. The man, this other John, is not angry…but he’s not amused. He tells Nick that he doesn’t know who he is, but he doesn’t like the messages. He tells him he probably has the wrong number. Nick says that he backpedals and apologies profusely to John. He tries to explain he wasn’t suggesting bestiality or necrophilia about him. He meant that for another John. Another John with the same phone number and similar voice.

The other John seems satisfied and hangs up. Nick sends me an embarrassed e-mail and asks when the hell I changed my number and why I didn’t tell him. I dig up the month-old mass e-mail with his address in the header and send it back. He claims to have never received it and then tells me his story.

I laugh, mostly at Nick’s ability to be a dick, but I feel bad for the guy who got my number. Nick wasn’t the only person who failed to get the memo. I later learned a couple clients called the old number as well a few friends. One admitted to calling him in the morning and waking him up. Another suggested he wasn’t a mentally sound individual. This probably says more about the people I associate with more than anything.

I imagine this John, this other John, answering call after call of mistaken identity. I imagine him listening to messages meant for me, some of which called him names, suggesting he’s a pederast, a sociopath. We’ve never even talked, but I’m guessing he probably thinks more highly of Mussolini.

After a few more weeks, it seems to blow over. Everyone has my correct number. I hope that the other John is no longer deluged with harassing calls and messages. I make a mental note that all future memos detailing my life should be sent with copies and done so repeatedly.

Months pass. I’ve moved on to other problems. Then I get an e-mail from a friend in St. Louis who just checked out the info page of my website.

“Holy shit,” she writes. “I just left the worst message on your old number!”