Member-only story

A Mature Reply Was Needed

Too bad it came 31 years too late

JA Boman
2 min readJan 5, 2025
Image using Dall-E 3 and Freepik, compiled in Canva, edited in Paint.net and TinyPNG. Concept by me.

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.

--

--

JA Boman
JA Boman

Written by JA Boman

Hi. I’m Jeffrey A. Boman. I help other writers improve their prose, and be more prolific. Join my list here: https://www.subscribepage.com/f8l0u8

No responses yet