The train ride that cured me of the ability to crotcheat
I was on the train, happily minding my own business with my audiobook and my hook, when two older women sitting near me (definitely 65+, traveling on senior discount tickets, I could tell by how haggard and used up they looked) clocked the yarn. They smiled, pointed with long, gnarled fingers, and made that universal "Oh, crochet!" face. I'm still an innocent, fresh-faced youth at nearly 29 and genuinely crave finding fellow crafters in real life, even if they're old biddies, so I paused my book, pulled my earbuds out, and leaned in for what I thought would be a sweet, intergenerational spark of crafting community.
They asked what I was making, and I held it up.
I explained the construction: a blanket yarn bee with gargantuan boobs barely contained by a bright blue bikini top (the kind That Happened Crochet designs). I openly mentioned, with a light laugh, that I was still mastering the boob technique on the go because it's a tricky learning curve.
The wrinkly, low-collagen smiles evaporated on the spot.
Flanking me as if to pin me in place, the boomers looked at the piece, exchanged a heavy look, and one of them scoffed with a threatening undertone: "Well. Aren't you brave, daring to do all that out in public."
Before I could even process the tone, the other boomer leaned forward with a tight, patronizing grimace. With stale coffee breath and through yellowed, crooked teeth, she glowered, "Look, why don't you just make a scarf? You're doing everything in the round. If you just worked back and forth from left to right, you could actually turn your work. Keep going long enough, and at least you'd end up with something you can actually wrap around your neck and get some real use out of."
From there, the conversation spiraled into pure, sour gatekeeping. They didn't drop it; they surrounded me with their bony, crepey arms and started talking excitedly across me about how crochet has become "such a trendy hype nowadays," rolling their eyes wildly while claiming they had already done all of this decades ago. Their chatter slowly morphed into wailing chants up to the sky demanding to know why everyone today is just making "all kinds of weird, unnecessary things" instead of sticking to the basics.
I was so uncomfortable and realized they had kicked my bag and its pepper spray under the seats out of my reach, but I refused to immediately shove my earbuds back in and give them the satisfaction of watching me retreat. So I just sat through the awkward tension and the ethereal moans emanating from the boomers' maws, keeping my ears open and quietly nodding with a flat face, counting my complex post stitches while they performed incantations bearing eerie similarities to the pattern for a basic granny square.
I know not how much time passed before I startled awake as the train grunted to a stop at my station. The bog-witches had disappeared, leaving in their wake only a hazy half-memory of frantically frogging my beloved boob-bee as they fed on its entrails before they melted into a watery haze and dribbled out the window. All that remained of the encounter was a reddening outline of an arthritic hand where it had apparently gripped me tight around the wrist, along with a bloom of radiant pain into my knuckles and fingers. I realized with horror that moved as slow as honey that I would never be able to hold a crochet hook again.
It’s just so frustrating because finding other makers outside of large, organized meetups is rare enough as it is. Most people on transit are staring at their phones—which I completely understand, because God knows I spend plenty of commutes binging shows to decompress. But when you finally look up hoping for a genuine connection with fellow makers in the wild, even makers with one foot in the grave, having it instantly turned into unsolicited witchcraft and back-in-my-day snobbery just stings.
I still want to find my community out there, but moments like this really make you question how many friendly glances are actually just setups for an old-lady lecture!
