The Gathering
I was finally feeling good enough to be up and about, so to the LGS I went. It was a quieter side of the weekend, so I got the nice end of the deal. Friendly regulars to catch up with, but not too many people as to encroach my comfort zone. Somewhere after the turn of the night and only the regulars were left, an extraordinary guest appeared.
When he went through the door, the three store owners immediately greeted him. He was a childhood friend, last met 23 years ago. He'd recently returned to Magic and saw the store in a mutual friend's Instagram. What commenced was a touching reunion story involving nasty decks because obviously you don't come to meet your childhood friend groups without challenging them into a game. Spoiler: they were relieved to find that everyone was just as annoying as they were in middle school (fondly).
Above all, the friend expressed amazement that the three guys not only kept with each other over the years but also managed to be close enough to co-own a hobby shop together (they were really insistent about this, really, that the ownership was shared). Two of them especially, their bickerings are part of the shop's daily show, the amusement for us regulars. We got confirmation that they've got this dynamics going at least 25 years.
We ended up staying past midnight. Watching the four of them interact and catch up with each other was fascinating, and we got to hear how the shop came to be.
The shopkeeper inherited half of his childhood home from his parents, and he planned to turn the empty garage into a coffee shop. The barista helped him getting this off the ground, as he had an experience opening a coffee shop several years back (but has since closed). At the time, he had a day job doing graphic design, but a company restructuring saw his team dissolved and suddenly he was left with no job and a sizable severance pay.
The store manager thought just a coffee shop in a city with a coffee shop every a hundred meter would be boring, and said they should just make it a community playspace half in jest. He had spent 20 years in the capital city working for an ad agency with all the hustle associated with the occupation, but suddenly he had a kid on the way and he wanted to be more present for his family.
Somehow, all three of them were back in their hometown at the same time, unemployed, with a property and some good nest egg. In the bedtime stories spun by patient grandmas, the stars aligned. They decided to give it a go.
I'm glad they did, and I hope the store would flourish in this small tight-knit format they envisioned.
Many of us know how difficult it is to maintain friendships as an adult, and very often I come across advices I personally find narrow-minded or insipid like avoiding confrontations. I've seen friendships dying out of petty resentment, small unsaid complaints piling up to a choking, sprawling tree with twisted, toxic tangles rooting deep in one's heart. These guys, they bicker and say some seriously stupid things towards each other (some hilarious, some eye-rolling), but at the end of the day it's pretty clear how protective they are to one another.
It's also sobering to hear just how many things can happen in the span of twenty years. They recounted friends lost to COVID, to natural disasters, to various illnesses. They reminisced of places lost to suburban development, to going back to analog games after brushes with digital addiction. They spoke about the winding road they took to where they were, three lifetimes worth of careers and more. Honestly, they're barely ten years my senior, but I was hit with the fact that there is still so much life ahead.
A reminder that tearing things down and starting anew can sometimes be the path you have to take, I tell myself, as I count and recount and recount my finances to prepare for my planned pivot.
Long live and prosper.