There is a block of concrete sitting conspicuously the parking lot of the ice cream store in my hometown of Sewickley. About one foot high, flat on top, three feet wide on each side. It is out of place. No markings, no purpose anyone can explain. It's probably a vestige of some long-gone structure — a leftover footprint of an old business that no longer exists, the base of a sign nobody remembers. It is, architecturally speaking, nothing. A raised, square chunk of concrete.

But I grew up sitting on that block.

My parents would take us to get ice cream on summer evenings, and while we were devouring our cones, my sister and I would climb up on it. It was a stage. It was a meeting place. It was our spot. We'd sit there with our legs dangling, chocolate on our faces, watching cars go by on Beaver Street. We’d talk about things together - it was just one place where Dad was a father, and Mom a mother. Nobody told us to sit there. It's just what we did. And I’ll bet you that thousands of other kids in this town have done the same thing with their families, across decades, without any of them knowing about the others. A tradition with no name and no author.

You would only ever find that block if you were on foot. Or if you got out of the car and stayed a while. It doesn't exist at highway speed. It barely exists at driving speed. It exists at the speed of a kid eating an ice cream cone — which is to say, at the speed of someone who isn't trying to get anywhere at all.

Some little corners of the earth are just built for this kind of thing.

For example, I went to college on a rural campus, so deep in the woods that if you wanted fun, you had to build it yourself — often literally, and usually involving materials or objects designed for a completely different, far less dangerous purpose.

Those years were spent in Hanover, New Hampshire — a small town on the Connecticut River where the nearest real city is over an hour away and the best-known nearby distraction is a two-lane road through the mountains. We weren’t exactly living like cave people, but by modern standards, there was nothing to do there — not in any way a phone or a search engine could solve. No faster option. No better route. Just the place, the people, and whatever you could make of an empty afternoon. Oh, and beer.

So, over time, we made things with those ingredients.

We sledded down hills in kayaks — which, for the uninitiated, works about as well as you'd expect.

We hiked mountains at midnight because someone (me) said, "What if we did?"

People built rafts out of inner tubes and barrels and floated them down the Connecticut River with a band playing on the shore.

We strapped on ice skates and tried to jump over as many kegs of beer as we could (until disciplinary action got in the way).

Most of these weird traditions have survived. Every February, students still plunge into a hole carved in the frozen surface of Occom Pond. It is collective idiocy, and it is worthy of annual celebration. February. In New Hampshire. Nobody makes them do this.

Once you learn that our most famous alumnus was Dr. Seuss, it makes perfect sense.

Of course, none of this was efficient. None of it moved anyone closer to a goal. If you measured those hours against anything productive, you'd call them wasted. You'd also be wrong, but I bet you'd have an airtight spreadsheet to back it up.

And yet they're the hours I remember best.

Not the lectures. Not the problem sets. Not the lines on the resume. The made up games. The midnight hikes. The things that had no reason to exist and existed anyway, because nobody was trying to get anywhere. The memories exist precisely because at some point in time, someone decided there was nothing better to do — blank space, open hours, the absence of a faster option — and into that space walked something weird and wonderful that couldn't have been planned.

Every day I drive home from work on two highways. Fastest route, heavy traffic, 18-20 minutes. My phone confirms it each time — and I believe my phone, because I have been trained to believe my phone. And I'm grateful for it — most nights this route gets me home to my son before bedtime.

But there's another way. About five minutes longer. It winds through the neighborhoods I grew up in, past fields where I played baseball, past the church where my best friends were married, past the ice cream store with the block. It is, by any measure of efficiency, the worse route. But it is nostalgic in a way the highway simply isn't. Every turn holds something.

I don't bring this up to argue against the highway. The highway is great. GPS? Great. The fact that I can shave five minutes off my commute and spend them with my kid instead — that's a genuine good. I'm not interested in romanticizing inconvenience or pretending we'd all be happier churning butter by candlelight.

But I do think it's worth noticing what, very often, the efficient option quietly diverts us from. Not because the efficiency is bad, but because the diversion is invisible. Nobody tells you what you're missing on the scenic route. Nobody tells you about the block in the parking lot. The things you're routed around don't announce themselves — that's the whole nature of them. They're the weird, small, human things that only reveal themselves when you're not trying to get somewhere. And if you don't know they're there, you can't miss them. Which is exactly the problem.

I enjoy taking walks much more now. Long ones, with Shannon and Drew, through the neighborhoods around our house. My wife’s hand, my son in the stroller, my dog on the leash, and no destination. And I notice things I'd never see from a car. A certain oak that leans over the sidewalk like it's eavesdropping. A garden someone clearly loves, tended with the kind of patience that has nothing to do with anyone else seeing it. A front porch where the same man sits every afternoon with a book and a coffee — he nods at me now because we've been passing each other for months. I don't know his name. He doesn't know mine. We have, I believe, the perfect relationship.

None of these things would survive an optimization. They’re not on the fastest route to anything. But they are the texture of a life — the weird, particular, unrepeatable details that make a place yours and not just somewhere you live. You don't own a town because your name is on a deed. You own it because you know which sidewalk panels are cracked and which porch light stays on all night and where that eyesore block of concrete by the ice cream shop is.

Just consider the experiences that mean the most to you — the ones you carry, the ones that shaped you. Technology and the efficiencies of modern life may have played a role. A phone got you there. A text made the plan. Those are real goods. But I'd wager that technology isn't what made those experiences what they are to you now. What made them was something that can't be optimized: the togetherness that happens when nobody's in a hurry. The inside joke born from an empty afternoon. Some traditions invent themselves because everyone was just there, with nowhere better to be.

Those moments are still out there. The block is still in the parking lot. The scenic route still winds through the old neighborhoods. The walks are still full of things you've never noticed. And yes, you can still buy a kayak from REI, review your health insurance, and tempt fate. The only thing required is awareness — the recognition that many of the efficiencies we enjoy, good as they are, have the quiet tendency to divert us from these strange and wonderful pockets of life. Not maliciously. Not even noticeably. But, perhaps, steadily.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you can't unsee it, you start choosing differently — not always, not as a rule, not even usually. But sometimes. You take the long way home. You leave the afternoon open. You walk instead of drive. And into that space walks something you didn't plan and couldn't have predicted, something weird and small and completely yours.

That's all I'm after. Not less technology. Not less efficiency. Just the awareness that some of the best parts of being alive tend to happen in the impromptu spaces between our plans, together. And maybe — every once in a while — in the willingness to take the five-minute detour and see what's there.

There's a block of concrete in a parking lot in Sewickley. I can't tell you why it's there. Honestly, it's hideous. But it's the best seat in town, if you've got the time.

John

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John Conrad