Teaching Reyes a Card Game in a Denver Layover

I’ve told this story enough times now that I probably round a few edges off it without meaning to, but the bones of it stay the same. Reyes and I were flying back from a plant service call, some regional weather system parked itself over Denver, and our connection got delayed for what the gate agent kept calling thirty more minutes, over and over, for closer to two hours. We’d already burned through our phones. Reyes had a deck of cards in his backpack, something small he’d bought at a game shop on a whim months earlier and never actually opened, and somewhere around hour three he pulled it out and asked if I wanted to figure out the rules with him instead of staring at the departures board.

Neither of us had played it before, which I think is actually why it worked. There’s a particular kind of patience two adults find with each other when you’re both learning something badly at the same time, no one’s the expert, no one’s waiting for the other person to catch up. We got the rules wrong twice in the first hand and just agreed to keep going anyway rather than start over, which is not how I’d recommend anyone actually learn a game, but it’s honest to how it happened.

By the time they finally called our new flight, we’d played it four times and I’d already decided I was buying my own copy the second I had a signal. What I didn’t expect is how much that one afternoon reshaped the next several years. I don’t think I’d call myself someone who was looking for a hobby. I had a job that ate most of my attention and most of my calendar, and reading and games were things other people did, the way some coworkers ran or brewed their own beer. Reyes didn’t set out to change that, he just had a deck of cards and a long delay and nothing better to do, and somehow that’s the whole reason I have a shelf of games in Tulsa now and a case by the door that never fully empties.

We still fly out together fairly often, same territory, same clients some months, and there’s a specific superstition we’ve never actually said out loud but both clearly follow, if a flight looks like it might run late, one of us has the travel case with something small in it. It’s happened enough times now that I don’t think it’s a coincidence anymore, more like the job has just quietly built this ritual into itself. I’ve taught two other coworkers a game in an airport bar since then, badly, the same way Reyes taught me, and I’ve come to think that’s actually the correct way to learn most things worth learning, imperfectly, with someone who has nowhere else to be for the next few hours either.