How to Make the Ordinary Extraordinary

If not for one summer, I wouldn't love my sister Nicole nearly as much as I do.

We grew up mostly missing each others' lives for one reason or another. When I was in junior high, she walked around the house and sang off key and it drove me crazy. In high school, I was rarely home, always out with friends. Before graduating from college I had spent two years in Spain and nine months in China. Our parents divorced and we lived in different homes. She moved to France for nine months the same day I returned to the Orient for six, then she graduated and moved to Colorado. If not for one summer, our paths would never have crossed closely enough to leave a lasting impression.

That summer, we moved to San Francisco with our older brother who would begin law school at Berkley in the fall. He later moved out and left us alone in our Market Street studio apartment.

For most of the day, we worked in the city - Nicole at a deli near the Civic Center and me at a moving company or a gimmicky tourist store on the pier. At night, though, and on our days off, we often rode my motorcycle through town, around the Embarcadero, through the heavy mist that condensed against our helmet visors, up and down the steep streets. We went to the park or the beach or the Golden Gate Bridge and ran across to Marin County, the ocean sprawling far below. We talked and cooked and went to church and woke up to 5.4 earthquakes rolling our beds like surfboards, our apartment surging up and down, back and forth like a passing ocean swell.

Somewhere in between all that I learned how much I love my sister. She is bright and interesting and curious and good natured. She sees the world from many perspectives and shares them clearly and insightfully. She laughs easily, asks good questions, confides openly and keeps secrets faithfully. Her presence naturally, automatically makes it clear that you are not alone and it matters.

It makes me sad to think how near I came to never knowing my little sister.

And I see that sometimes the more commonplace something becomes, the more well-known and ordinary and familiar, the deeper your love for it grows. The more it becomes a part of your life and yourself.

Sometimes the exotic, the mysterious and the unknown left to discover proves itself far less precious than the known, the normal, the dependable - the exquisite, extraordinary ordinary.