Back when my hair was brown, and the world was moderately sane, comic books cost twelve cents, men held doors open for ladies, and most stores, at least here in Vermont, were closed on Sunday. The world got along just fine in this arrangement for many, many years. People planned, had plenty to eat and drink, and there were very few fatalities due to acute shopping deprivation.

My family moved to California in 1972, when I was 12. There, to my amazement, hardly any stores were closed on Sundays. In fact, many stores and restaurants were open 24/7, closing only for Christmas and a half-day on Thanksgiving. Through my late teens and beyond, as I became an auto mechanic (we weren’t called “technicians” yet), I worked Monday through Friday only. No shops or dealerships would even think of being open on the weekends. It was not even on the radar.

Into my 30s, this changed. And I was partly to blame. At first, we were offered time-and-a-half to work a half-day on Saturday. By the time I had grown a brown moustache to go with my thirty-year-old, brown hair, I was working all day, every Saturday … for regular pay.

By the time gray hair started manifesting itself on my head and moustache, I was working half-days on Sundays as well. My days off had somehow become Thursday and Monday. Stores were open all the time, so I supposed that one day off was as good as another.

By the time gray had taken over my head, I realized how bad I looked with a moustache and shaved it off; I realized that my daughter was almost college-bound, and I was now working on her car on my days off … and that I had missed almost all of her baseball games, colorguard events, and a huge part of her childhood. I vaguely remember being surprised at how much braces cost, and failing miserably at engineering a rubberband-powered car. (It went 1.7 inches). Which, ironically, is the exact height I felt, as I realized what had happened.

Greed.

That’s what happened. The store owners got greedy, then the shop owners, and then I got greedy too.

This came to mind this past full moon, when a lady was trying to get my shop to put on her snow tires. Of course, we were already booked two weeks out by our regular, local customers who had scheduled a month ago. This answer did not go over well with this lady and her Connecticut plates. It would not do at all. She stated coldly that she could come in on the following Sunday or on Thanksgiving Day; those were the only openings in her busy schedule.

She looked stunned when I told her we would be closed on both of these days.

I’ve given it a lot of thought over the past few weeks. I thought about when I was young, and Sundays being a day of rest. The third of the Ten Commandments is to do no work on the Sabbath. I’m not sure if the Commandments are in any particular order of importance, but for the record, “Thou shalt not murder” comes in at number five. Just saying.

I remember I had a Jewish friend who wouldn’t work on Saturday. That was the Jewish Sabbath … presumably the day God, through Moses, was talking about in the Bible. I was taught as a Catholic that Sunday was our “sabbath.” In the second Book of Genesis, it says that God rested on the “seventh day.” The first Book, however, does not specify which day of God’s work week it began, so I think that knowing which day is less important than taking a day off.

It’s a good idea if we all have the same day off, so pushy people don’t want me to install their snow tires on my sabbath, for example. I guess that was what the country was trying for, back when my hair was brown. So, we humans, being made in God’s image (Genesis, Chapter One), need a day off to rest, reflect, and breathe. Don’t get swept away by the ocean wave of greed, the tsunami of hurry. Vermont is well inland. Let’s keep it that way. Our days are short, and we mustn’t take the gift of life for granted. There are only so many baseball games in our daughter’s childhood, after all.

A native Vermonter, Paul Wein has finally made it back home to Grafton, Vt., after 45 years in California, where he met his wife (and photographer) Angela. They have an adult daughter, Cassie, and two cats. He can be reached at pwein35@gmail.com.