Embracing Inconvenience (Sort Of)

“What is without periods of rest will not endure.”

—Ovid

(Quote discovered through Becoming Minimalist. Full disclosure: I don’t have much Ovid around the house.)

We were still using landlines when I put the finishing touches on our home, then to be a summer rental. I reasoned that people don’t vacation in Maine to plug in, so I didn’t subscribe to cable, instead offering a VHS and DVD player. And I didn’t think they needed to be waltzing around chatting on the portable telephone.

Rotary phones attached to the wall seemed perfect.

It was all very retro and charming until we moved in full-time and I took a call from someone who held me hostage on the line for nearly two hours. Trapped in the kitchen, I paced in an 8’ semicircle from the wall.  

The rotary phones were gone the next day.

We grow accustomed to modern conveniences, and it can be tough to go back. Growing up, Sundays offered little in the way of retail options, not due to Blue Laws, which by then we didn’t have in New Hampshire, but due to custom. Sunday was the sabbath, and it was quiet.

Or deadly dull, depending on your age.

Inevitably Sunday was the day my sister and I would yearn to bake something, but with no chance of a trip to town, we’d have to perform a kind of pantry calculus, matching what we had on hand as closely as we could to what we wanted to bake. And sometimes, bothering the neighbors for what was missing.

It was fun.

In high school, we were elated to watch the construction of our town’s very first convenience store, open seven days a week, and late into the night. What we wanted, when we wanted it. My friends and I mostly wanted Cool Ranch Doritos at 10 p.m. and -- oh joy! -- we got them.

In college, a professor raised the question of the expanding American workweek and challenged us -- is your ability to get groceries at midnight worth the sacrifices made by workers who then must work bizarre hours? I thought then that he might be too radical.

But I’ve never been able to stop pondering his question.

Now, in most places, there’s little commercial difference between Sundays and any other day of the week. I’m not someone who believes the old ways are automatically the best ways, but it’s hard not to see our seven-day commercial workweeks as a mistake.

With five teenagers in the house for an end-of-summer movie fest, today I called our local pizza place to schedule an order. The phone rang and rang, so I went to their Facebook page. Closed! Not just Labor Day, but the entirety of Labor Day weekend. 

We pivoted and found pizza somewhere new, so we were hardly inconvenienced. But I haven’t been able to stop pondering the decision to close for the holiday weekend. The more society and science begin to understand the life-giving, brain-saving value of rest, it’s hard not to see that decision as wisdom.

They’ll have our business when they open again.