Herewith, a question on the fine art of intergenerational dealings.
Dealings, with healthy doses of advice, history and life-hack gems interspersed.
Dealings all about the things, that, well, just might be more relevant in your day-to-day, than you think they are.
That is, how many places are around out there, where a 14-year-old kid who knows everything there is to know about smartphones, can share the same instructional space with a guy in his 86th year who is an expert in the lost art of shoe-cobbling?
D.J. Cassell laughed – and said he could only think of one.
“And it was ours,” he said.
It all played out this past Saturday at The Shack Neighborhood House, the outreach agency in Pursglove that has been helping families in the Scotts Run area and elsewhere since 1928.
The Shack hosted the state’s first “Repair Café” that day through the Scotts Run Resonance Project, a program aimed at preserving the history and culture of the Osage area.
It was supported through grant dollars from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Central Appalachia Living Traditions initiative.
Call it a gloriously local event, with an international motivation, said Cassell, who is a community coordinator with the Resonance Project.
Globally, the Repair Café has been around since 2010, when a group of kindred spirits in Amsterdam rose up against the manufacturing and retail scourge of planned obsolesce.
Because things were no longer built to last, repairs were either impossible or just impractical or cost-effective, at the least.
Off to the landfill, said items went.
Last weekend’s repair café at The Shack harkened back the community and resilience of Scotts Run in its early days, Cassell said.
More than 50 people came out, to learn those 20th century things and those 21st century things (i.e., the smartphone kid), he said.
It was just as much a celebration of place as it was anything else, he said.
Cassell can tell you all about that.
He’s a Seattle native who came here from the Pacific Northwest to play football. He was recruited by West Virginia Wesleyan as a defensive lineman after suiting up for two years at a junior college in California.
“I was definitely the lightest lineman on the team,” he said.
Cassell got tired of knocking heads and decided he would use his entrepreneurial artisan bent, instead.
He founded The Rambling Root, a popular restaurant and brewery in Fairmont and used his Seattle-caffeinated birthright to get into coffee roasting.
Cassell is also a practitioner in another of those lost-art pursuits: cast-iron restoration, a topic he presented at last week’s repair café.
“This is a special place,” he said. “You can invent yourself here. Or, reinvent yourself here.”
Jessica Varner didn’t necessarily reinvent herself.
In the ways of a lot of West Virginians who move away, she simply moved back.
After working in marketing and outreach in Pittsburgh and California she took those country roads home to her native Morgantown, to take the job as executive director at The Shack.
“I volunteered here as a kid,” she said.
Like Cassell, she appreciates the essence of the outreach agency.
She likes that Eleanor Roosevelt championed it, and that volunteers in recent years kicked in donations to repair the gymnasium floor that buckled and needed to be replaced twice — after flooding in 1997 and 2001.
She likes that people again searched their hearts and bank accounts to help buy a new van last summer to transport youngsters to field trips and all those after-school programs.
And she especially enjoys that The Shack is currently the choice of 160 youngsters enrolled in its summer camp — and that they’re splashing and romping in a swimming pool that was the first integrated one of its kind south of the Mason-Dixon Line in the 1950s.
“We’ve been here in since 1928,” she said.
“That’s 95 years. That’s forever.”
Huh, she said: Maybe some things are built to last, after all.
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