So over the weekend, my wife and I had to go to a local electronics dealer to get a new phone.

And since that process always takes longer than I think it will, it was almost 8 pm when we left there. Even though I had 2 pork chops thawed, I didn’t have the heart to go home and cook, so we took a fling on the nearest place, a hole in the wall Chinese restaurant.

I’ve missed good Chinese food in the past 18 months. For whatever reason, many local places have remained closed or were open on terms so grim that I stayed away.

To ensure that this wouldn’t be the same, my wife sat in the car quickly perusing reviews while I rudely stared through the front door.

But it looked normal. Like there were normal people eating their normal specials of General Tso’s and an egg roll.

So we went in. And the image we’d seen was no illusion, and we had a wonderful and normal meal.

Was it spectacular? No. Amazing food? No. What it was was good. And normal.

Who would have thought two years ago that “normal” would come to be a statement of high praise? But here we are.

Life is a vast landscape of ordinary events. Most of the time we work, sleep, play games with our children, talk to our husband or wife, maybe go to a movie. In other words, ordinary things that make up the plains of life.

But there are mountaintops. A child is born. A wedding takes place. There’s a spectacular sunset. But we’ve learned in the last two years that while the mountains are wonderful, the beauty of our lives is mostly about a love of small things. Ordinary sounds so, well, ordinary. It’s anything but that. It’s children on playgrounds and laughing with friends at a bar and a church social.

Because we are born and if we are lucky enough, we go through a vast trajectory of thousands of sunrises to come to, perhaps, 80 or 90 or even 100 years. And what will make our lives beautiful, however long or short they last are those ordinary things. Cherish those ordinary things. And may those ordinary things never again go away.