The Beauty of Inefficiency

My grandfather Clifford Oden was a wise and practical man. A mathematics teacher, he worked the numbers and the angles, and I’m told he was the first full-time professor at LeTourneau University. Grandpa Oden tackled even the most benign problems with the methodical eye of a chess master, one slow move at a time. I loved going into his shop in their standalone garage, eyeing all the tools hung in neat rows, the lines of Gerber baby food jars each filled (and labeled, by type and size) with wood screws, metal screws, hex bolts, cap bolts (and nuts for each) round head nails, finish nails, masonry nails.

However, grandpa was not much for aesthetics. He wanted to get the job done properly and efficiently. Beauty never factored into the equation. When I became old enough to take on mowing his yard, he sat me down at the dining room table and pulled out a yellow legal pad. Grandpa sketched his back yard, calculating before my eyes the square feet of the landscape, translating his figures into steps taken pushing the Sears Craftsman mower. Next he drew a rectangle, demonstrating how efficient it was to mow in a box shape rather than in rows back and forth. “You’ll save hundreds of steps,” grandpa said, tapping his pencil on the pad for emphasis.

Recently, I mowed our new yard at our old cottage for the first time. It’s a backyard laid out by whimsy. We have a maple tree, a poplar, boxwoods run wild, multiple garden beds with ivy and bee balm and ferns of every sort. It’s lovely, but it’s a mower’s nightmare, with all the nooks and crannies. I thought about my grandpa while I mowed in a wide, circular motion, how proud he’d be to see me save energy and shave minutes off the job.

The only problem was, as I cut, everything seemed all wrong. I felt as though I were imposing something onto this stretch of ground. The grass was now short, but there was no symmetry, no elegance. On my second mow, I asked grandpa’s forgiveness and slowly, tediously cut in vertical rows, back and forth, back and forth. It felt like heresy. But when I was done, there was a beauty there that perhaps only a yard man could appreciate.

Sometimes we should save time or money or energy. But sometimes we should stand still and watch for the slope of a yard, the slant of a life, the near imperceptible aches of the heart. There are so many good, good things that refuse to be measured in terms of efficiency, speed or accomplishment. We best pay extra close attention to those. I wonder if we may be close to loosing too many of them.

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