Sandi Kahn Shelton

We have been having a little patch of O.L.

O.L. is a term coined some years ago by my friend Alice, and it stands for Ordinary Life. O.L., we decided, is what is happening to you when all the horrible, terrible stuff isn’t currently happening: your spouse hasn’t just been found in bed with the entire waitstaff of Hooter’s, nobody has just told you that you have two weeks to live, and your house is still standing despite the fact you haven’t cleaned out the dryer duct for three years.

No, O.L. is much more insidious than those things. Instead of being flamboyantly awful, it is the gradual wearing down and breakage of nearly everything around you, one fouled sparkplug or faucet drip at a time, until you are brought to your knees, begging for mercy.

O.L. comes on like a thief in the night. One little tiny thing goes wrong, and you competently deal with it, and you think, “Well, now, that wasn’t so bad.” This is where you’ve made your first mistake, thinking that it will stop there. Perhaps, as in our case, the first evidence was simply a little noise being made by the heater, a sort of subtle vrooming noise when the heater finishes its job of heating up the tank of hot water.

That’s all, just a whispered vroom in the morning while I was brushing my teeth.

Two days later it said vroooooooom, and then later, in the middle of the night, I woke up hearing a VROOOOOOM so loud it rattled the windows. The oil guy came out in the first light of day, and declared that certain valves were clogged. He fixed them and left.

The next day the dog suddenly started limping and indicated with his piteous cries that he no longer could haul his own 78 pounds up and down the stairs. So I hand-fed him and my husband carried him wherever he needed to go.

I started getting a little suspicious. I’ve seen O.L. before.

Later that day, the clutch in my eight-year-old car started making a rattling sound, and the mechanic looked at me straight in the eye and said, “How many more months do you want to keep this car?” Months? Months?! So I told him about the kid who just went off to college, hinted at the size of the tuition bills we’d just signed on for–and patiently explained that we’d hoped for another, oh, fourteen years out of the car.

“A thousand dollars,” he said with a straight face. 

So now that we’ve had Heater O.L., Dog O.L., and Car O.L.–three of the most expensive O.L.s you can have–I started thinking maybe we’d paid our dues and would be released from its grip.

But no. At the end of last week, I bruised my ankle on a box of books, Stephanie called from college to say she’d had to go to the emergency room because she sprained her foot, the dryer timer started refusing to turn off so the clothes just bake forever until you think to go and turn them off, and the bank and I had a little disagreement about how much money was in my checking account.

Obviously a case of Full-Blown O.L.

Normally I’d be worried– except that today we went with friends to Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island on a day when it was expected first to be rainy, then to be partly sunny but cold and windy. I’m a little beaten down and my ankle hurts, so I pictured car breakdowns, howling winds, possible food poisoning. Instead, the sun came out in a dazzling blue sky, and the six of us sat out on beach chairs, just as we have done every September for the past nine years, and the sun shone on us, and the air smelled like the combination of salt, fish and frying clams–a smell I now associate with the end of summer. I felt myself start to unwind just the slightest bit.

Some of us in the group got on boogie boards and rode the waves, skimming along in the low tide all the way to the shore. We drank beer and ate hummus and crackers and cheese and chicken and chips and salsa, and reminisced about all the years we’ve taken this trip together. We three women–Karen, Jill and I–all took a walk on the beach and we found a starfish and several lucky pieces of sea glass. We ate ice cream and watched two little dogs romping in the surf.

On the way home, we stopped for seafood at one of those outdoor places (no line, even!) and watched the sailboats skimming into the harbor.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed, O.L. can be scared off by a day as good as this one.

Okay, so I haven’t been keeping up with the world. I realize that I haven’t been cool for some time now.

I’m not really sure how I got so far behind. All I can say is this: be careful, because if you step away from the popular culture momentarily so you can raise three kids and feed a golden retriever twice a day and try to keep your checkbook balanced and the geraniums watered, one day you look up and people are taking photographs with their freaking telephones and wondering why you aren’t writing about your personal life on the Internet. I was a little surprised to realize this was something people did.

I am happy to talk about my personal life to almost anyone–not because I imagine it’s the most interesting life anybody ever heard about–but just because I was raised in the South, where telling stories was almost a sporting event. In my family we didn’t go on elaborate vacations or excel at touch football in the front yard. We talked. I have an old tape recording of my mom talking with her best friend, just one of those leisurely conversations between friends–and it’s the most remarkable thing: both of them are talking a mile a minute at the very same time, without pausing for breath or even listening to what the other one is saying. That’s the kind of stock I come from.

For years I wrote a column about my family life for the New Haven Register, which was eventually picked up by Working Mother magazine, where it ran for ten years. That was when I discovered the startling fact that family life is actually funny. Before I started writing these things down, I didn’t know it was amusing when my two-year-old fell to the floor in a fit because I refused to pour out the soy sauce and give her orange juice in the soy sauce bottle, or when I had to outfit a dozen wooden clothespins in authentic Renaissance costumes in the two hours between dinner and bedtime. Washing machine overflows all over the kitchen floor, and the babysitter quits on the spot? All three kids come down with chicken pox three days apart? Lock my keys in the car five times in one day? All good column material!

And so here I am, joining the 21st century with a blog. Soon I’ll be taking pictures with the phone.