Harger: Ordinary abundance and how the most astonishing thing about your life is no longer being astonished by it

There’s a seafood shop in South Bend, where I went Sunday afternoon to buy some crab.

The woman ahead of me in line was in town for a reunion — the South Bend High School class of 1956.

That got my attention. First, because she looked fantastic. She was walking with a cane, but she was doing it in wedges. Sharp, funny, completely engaged with everyone around her.

And then I did the math. She graduated one year before my dad would have. He died nearly 10 years ago.

So I stood there in line, looking at someone from his generation, and wondering what she has seen.

Highway 101 runs right past my childhood, or where it used to be

The timing of that question wasn’t an accident. I’d spent the whole morning driving through my own past.

My wife and I had taken advantage of one of the great benefits of having an 18-year-old and a 14-year-old: You can leave them home for a night and go be grown-ups somewhere else. We mounted a TV on the wall at my mom’s in Aberdeen (nothing says romantic getaway like arriving with a toolkit and looking for studs), walked the beach at Long Beach, and spent the night in Astoria, where two adult beverages cost $10.50. Total. A remarkable price if you’re used to Seattle.

Then, on Sunday, we drove north on Highway 101, past Naselle, where I went to elementary school through the fourth grade. Through Nemah, past the farm where I lived for about four years as a kid.

The house is gone. The place where my childhood happened is basically a tree farm now.

Life on that farm was a lot different from the life my kids know. For a couple of years we didn’t even have television. Radio mattered. I treasured that AM connection to KIRO. And every once in a while, if the atmospheric gods smiled, my big brother could pull a skip of the KISW signal onto his boombox. A Seattle FM rock station reaching Nemah felt like a little miracle. You adjusted the antenna. You tried not to breathe too hard in its direction. And whatever song was playing right then was the song you got.

The viral Ordinary Abundance website put a name on it

A website called Ordinary Abundance blew up on my feed this weekend, and it put a name on all of this. Built by a researcher named Jordan Dworkin, it walks you through an ordinary modern apartment, and every ordinary object opens a quote from someone in history for whom that object was unimaginable. In 1888, the writer Edward Bellamy said music on demand at home would have been considered “the limit of human felicity.”

The limit of human felicity. It’s in your pocket right now.

I can think of a song I haven’t heard in 30 years, type a few words, and hear it before I finish explaining to my kids why I wanted to. The kid on that farm in Nemah, holding his breath next to a boombox, would not have believed it.

And music is the small example. When we moved away from Nemah in the mid-1980s, I remember feeling like I might never talk to some of my friends again. That was what moving meant. Geography had real power, and people disappeared from your life. My son had a friend move away five or six years ago. They still talk. They’re still part of each other’s lives. Technology changed what it means to say goodbye.

Then there are the miracles so ordinary we don’t even name them. Clean hot water out of a wall. A warm house at the turn of a dial. And medicine. Over just the past few months I’ve watched treatments save the lives of friends and people they love. Procedures we now discuss as options would have sounded like science fiction to the class of 1956. People I care about are still here because somebody figured out how to do something that, within a single lifetime, medicine simply could not do.

That may be the most extraordinary kind of ordinary there is.

Housing costs, loneliness, and the case against just being grateful

I know the obvious response. Housing costs are crushing people. Health care can be maddeningly expensive. Loneliness is real. War is real. Politics is ugly. There are people in our communities who are struggling, and nobody should wave an iPhone at them and say, “See? Everything is great.”

The point is perspective. We’ve developed a cultural habit of noticing every way life has gotten worse while barely registering the ways it’s gotten better. We can confront what’s broken without going blind to what’s been built. The Ordinary Abundance site puts it this way: our restlessness in the middle of all this abundance is to humanity’s credit. Noticing what we have and demanding better aren’t opposites.

South Bend High’s class of 1956 saw every bit of it arrive

Which brings me back to the woman in the seafood shop.

She stepped out of South Bend High into a world of leaded gasoline and rabbit ears, a world where a long-distance call meant checking the clock. Music was whatever the radio decided. Moving away meant goodbye. Half the medicine cabinet hadn’t been invented.

And she has watched the entire transformation, all of it, inside one lifetime that isn’t finished yet. Every song, every face on a screen, every friend who never got lost, every life the doctors now save. She was there before any of it, and she was standing in a seafood shop on a Sunday afternoon, buying fish and cracking jokes and wearing wedges. Whatever she’s seen, it hasn’t slowed her down much.

There will always be plenty to fix. But for the class of 1956, and for the kid I was in Nemah trying to pull a Seattle radio station out of the air, what we call ordinary life would have looked impossible.

We’re living in somebody else’s unimaginable future. She got to watch it arrive.

The least the rest of us can do is notice it.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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