IT’S LABOR DAY, and I had a nice run down Cherokee Boulevard (below and to the right). Yesterday I did Lakeshore park (at top). Tomorrow, I’ll give my knees a break and go to the gym instead, which is just as well since Frances’ remnants are supposed to bring us clouds and rain.

The “Vol Navy” was headed back downriver after last night’s football game, the sun was shining, there were people jogging, and sunbathing, and reading on the park benches.

It was a perfectly ordinary nice day. But if we’ve learned anything over the past three years — though some of us, alas, knew it even before then — a perfectly ordinary nice day is a kind of a miracle. It’s something to be savored, and not taken for granted, because there are plenty of extraordinarily bad days out there that could happen at any time.

Ann Althouse notes the final line of a story about the schoolhouse massacre in Beslan. Before it happened, says one of the survivors, “we never knew how happy we were.”

It’s been my experience that whenever anything dreadful happens in your life, you look back on those perfectly ordinary days and say just that. We never knew how happy we were.

Try to know that now. Happy Labor Day!