Culture & Community
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Traditional Skill Games Didn’t Need Saving. They Needed an Audience That Could Find Them.
A mahjong club in my area nearly folded in 2019. Four regular members, all over sixty, meeting in the back room of a community center that smelled permanently like old coffee. Then one of them started a small Discord server mostly as a joke, just to post photos of good hands, and within a year…
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A 74-Year-Old Woman Wrecked a Table of Twenty-Somethings at Euchre, and Nobody Saw It Coming
I watched this happen at a VFW hall outside Dayton a couple of summers ago. Four college kids sat down at Edna’s table thinking they’d found the easy match of the tournament. Ninety minutes later they were still trying to figure out how she kept reading their signals before they’d finished making them. She wasn’t…
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A Phone Camera Saved a Game That Almost Died With One Man
There’s a mancala variant played in parts of West Africa called Ayo, and a few years back I read about a village elder who was, as far as anyone could tell, the last person in his community who remembered the full tournament rule set, the version with the extra capture conditions nobody had bothered writing…
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Simple Hobbies Didn’t Come Back. We Just Got Tired First.
My neighbor Diane bought a four hundred dollar stand mixer during the sourdough phase of 2020, used it maybe eleven times, then gave it to Goodwill and picked up knitting instead. When I asked why, she said kneading dough by hand was the part she actually liked, and the machine had quietly taken that away…
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The Traditions We Keep, Even With a Phone in Every Pocket
My uncle Ray has run the same dunk tank at our church fair for eleven years, and every single year he gripes about the same busted valve that sprays water on his shoes instead of the target. I bring this up because a coworker asked me last week, half joking, whether stuff like church fairs…