#136. Stinky & Joan of Arc (Saturday, October 12, 2002)
What was your best day…of being at the peak of a friendship without even knowing?
Based on this ridiculous title alone, you could probably guess this would be another story about my lifelong favorite card game, Magic: The Gathering (#22). But no, this was not some ancient precursor of LIBOR & Taxes (#88) that won with poison counters and sacrifice effects. The source of this title is much less coherent, though equally nonsensical.
After discovering Magic in fourth grade and using it in fifth grade to become best friends with Derek Dunlop (#108), sixth grade introduced one socially aggressive Steven Fennessey (#18, #54)—who thought it was a game for “big geeks”, and soon Derek and everyone else in my grade did too. So, for a full year, while I still followed the new sets, I was left with no one at school to play with.
But with seventh grade came a whole new cohort to my school, some of whom played Magic, and who had not been indoctrinated by Steven… yet. Namely, Todd Xing (#9), who took the same bus as me and was even more of a Magic obsessive than I was, along with Aiden Walsh (#2) and Noah Poirier (#51), best friends from their previous school who shared a collection.
On this Saturday, Todd has organized a “Magic tournament” at his house, and I’m pretty pumped. At that age, I was the type of kid who never hung out with classmates outside of school.
But it turns out no one else can actually make it for the whole day. So the morning becomes just Todd and me battling against each other and making a few trades.
Later that morning, Todd, his mom, and I end up on a call with Aiden and Noah, who are hanging out at Aiden’s place. There’s a lot of inexplicable back-and-forth over logistics, with momentary periods of Aiden stepping away and Noah saying he’s “grazing with the cows” (because the street Aiden lives on was Cowley Avenue), but eventually it’s arranged. Todd’s mom will drive us to Cowley Avenue that afternoon, and it hasn’t even hit me what I’m about to do: go with one friend, after spending the morning at his house, to another friend’s house, where a fourth friend is visiting, so the four of us can just hang out and play my favorite game in the world. With minimal planning and effort. What kind of social miracle was this?
And so, for a couple hours that afternoon, I’m in the basement playing four-way Magic and trading cards with Todd, Aiden, and Noah. Strangely, what elevates this is Aiden’s mom making us a huge bowl of popcorn for our intense Magic deals (“we need that for energy”, Aiden tells us), and somehow that makes the whole thing feel even more effortlessly communal.
So where does this ridiculous title come from? Well, in my collection I had a bunch of legendary creatures originally from a super-old set (naturally titled Legends), which I had obtained by trading my precious Spiritmonger to a guy at Chinese Math and Science Camp in the summer1. Only later did I realize that the reprint versions I had were practically worthless. But they were still cool. So, I was able to leverage that coolness by trading two of them, Stangg and Johan, to Aiden and Noah for some more powerful (and valuable) cards from some recent sets.
But as we near the end of the trade, adding and removing cards until both sides are happy, I hesitate. Am I really getting enough for these? Sure, only I know how little they’re actually worth—but they still feel special. I tell them to hold up, but Aiden refuses: the trade is happening. Because he already has nicknames designated for Stangg and Johan. They will henceforth be deemed Stinky and Joan of Arc!
Well, you can’t deny someone that. So, I compromise on the last piece, we complete the trade, and shortly after I depart Cowley (which has no actual cows) with Todd, only dimly appreciating how effortless the whole social day had been.
N.B. I then immediately fumbled the opening by not inviting Aiden and Noah to my birthday party the following Friday, instead inviting Jensen from my old sixth-grade class—who couldn’t even make it. Neither Aiden nor Noah ever came to my house, and I never visited either of theirs again. Things between us never quite got back to what they were here.