I have heard people complain that the line at Yard Sale Bagels is too long. This is incorrect. The line is not an unfortunate byproduct of the bagel. The line is the highest form of the bagel.

If a new food establishment opens in Bozeman and a person can walk right in without waiting behind at least six damp strangers and one man wearing trail gaiters for no current reason, then something has gone wrong. Either the product is weak or the town has lost faith in itself. I do not believe either is true.

Waiting outside for breakfast is one of the few remaining civic experiences we still share without a moderator. A line creates temporary equality. The rich wait. The poor wait. The transplant waits. The fifth-generation local waits while explaining he remembers when nobody in this town used words like “small-batch schmear.” This is social fabric, and it costs less than a retreat.

“I got there at 7:12 and still had to stand around,” my neighbor told me with the grave tone usually reserved for flood updates. Exactly. That is how you know the thing belongs to the town and not merely to commerce. Commerce serves. A line asks something of you.

We claim to value local business, then become alarmed when local business behaves locally by being charming, slightly undersized and immediately overrun. This is the contradiction at the heart of modern Bozeman. We want handmade life at metropolitan scale, with no inconvenience attached. We want authenticity with parking.

The line also performs a useful moral function. It reveals who among us still believes breakfast should occur instantly and who is prepared to endure a little weather in exchange for a boiled dough ring made by human hands before sunrise. The second group is more likely to return its shopping cart and wave at trail workers. That is just data.

If you truly cannot tolerate waiting, there are alternatives. Grocery stores are full of bagels shaped like surrender. Nobody is forcing you to stand outside and become part of a local institution. But if you do stand there, at least understand that you are participating in something larger than hunger. You are briefly consenting to a town.

I felt the same way when I defended the changed pickle at the deli against the hysterics. Not every inconvenience is an injury. Some are proof that another person still made a decision.

Let the line remain. It is orderly, public and mildly cold. In other words, it is ours.

Harold Crimp lives east of town and believes a queue is just a meeting with purpose.