One day long ago, while a teen living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I nearly walked into Elizabeth Taylor, wearing a muumuu. To be clear, I wasn't wearing the muumuu. Ms. Taylor was. If memory serves correctly, I was wearing Levis.

In my youth, actors were a common sight.

They bought milk at Safeway; they lived in the house down the street; they filmed in the neighborhood.

Walton's Mountain was in Burbank, not in Virginia; the Bat Cave was in Griffith Park, not on the outskirts of Gotham City; Casablanca's airport was in Van Nuys, not in French Morocco.

An unshaven Jonathan Winters asked me for a bucket of chicken; George Burns and John Denver read their lines in front of the house; William Shatner and Angie Dickenson filmed in the halls of the high school. Ron Howard--with his brother Clint--and The Artist Who Would Become Weird Al Yankovich were classmates in school.

Now, if my purpose was merely to drop names, I could've done better than William Shatner.

No, the purpose of this reflection is simply this: what might have been quite remarkable in other places and at other times, became quite common in the neighborhood of my youth.

And, therefore, the remarkable became quite unremarkable.

Is there something remarkable in your life that, having become common, has become unremarkable?

Mightn't it be possible to celebrate anew what you've come to take for granted?

How might you restore the wonder?