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My sweet niece recently forced me to download Pokémon Go to my cellphone in that self-serving way that women do when they want something:  she wanted me to be able to send her gifts, and to have another phone on which she can play the game (to be clear:  she does not have her own cellphone; she plays on her mom’s phone).  Being the agreeable and easily buffaloed uncle that I am, I obliged.  We downloaded the game and merrily went about catching Pokémon, the lovable little monsters from the smash hit video game franchise.

A week or two later she texted me (again, from her mom’s phone) asking me to be her friend in the game.  I was teaching a piano lesson.  After about fifteen minutes, she wrote, “I’ve been waiting on you for quite awhile. 😠”  Again, being the agreeable and buffaloed etc., etc., I hastily figured out how to accept her little request (it’s harder than it should be!) and we started sending each other little presents in the game.

That was the extent of my Pokémon Go-ing for a few weeks.  I grew up playing the Pokémon games and loved them—I still do!—but I didn’t think much about this little mobile app that seemed to have reached its peak in the first two or three months following its release in 2016.

Then Spring Break hit and, while yours portly kept fairly busy, I still had a good bit of downtime.  I also found myself taking a lot of walks with my dad.  While he’s technically retired, he still works part-time as the town administrator for a small town here in South Carolina, and conducts a great deal of his business on the phone while walking the dogs (perhaps the most Boomer work habit conceivable; they love being on the phone as much as us Millennials hate it).  That got me looking for something to do with my hands while he dictated life-changing decisions to bureaucratic functionaries, so I pulled out Pokémon Go.

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