Member-only story
Sigh. Too soon, old, too late, smart.
I don’t know if the other people involved will read this, but it’s about time I clarified this.
I’ve had a lot of free time to think about this — the pandemic gave it to everyone — and an event in my past has grown more clear:
In 1993 and 1994, I attended GenCon, the mecca of tabletop RPGs, in Milwaukee, WI. I went on the road with a group I thought were friends.
The Border Patrol was hostile between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, MI. This was before we needed passports to cross the border. Our birth certificates were enough. As I presented mine, the guard snarled, “I don’t speak French!” (it was in English).
We had a long wait as they checked the status of our rental car. They walked around brandishing guns.
This road trip had that lousy memory.
We talked about that trip A few weeks later, and I mentioned that certificate reaction.
An excitable group member asked if I’d been obnoxious to the guard.
Confrontation in my twenties put me on the defensive — usually making things worse. This was one of those times.