Today is Remembrance Day in Canada (equivalent to Memorial Day in the U.S.) and my wife and I went to a ceremony a couple of villages up the coast. A nice ceremony, mercifully short, and even more mercifully held indoors. It was cold and very, very windy today! Afterwards, there was a lunch at the community hall.
The lunch is a classic small village community hall: long tables where you sit with random other people, buffet at the end of the room. I was doing a good job (for me) of chatting up the people around me. My wife was sitting beside me, talking to a man diagonally opposite her, away from me. Never shy about sharing her opinions, she brought their conversation around to Donald Trump. I was thinking, "Don't go there! He might be..." Too late! Yes he was a supporter.
I am very conflict-averse, so, while monitoring their conversation, I continued talking to the nice lady beside me. Then my wife, as an example of T's policies mentioned his treatment of transgender people. The man started spewing the kind of stuff you would expect of a Trump supporter on the subject. I listened enough that the guy could tell that I was listening, and I rolled my eyes at the appropriate moments when my wife turned to me for a reaction. But mostly, I wanted to hide. Eventually, the guy realized that he was not on friendly soil and left.
The lady beside me had heard enough of the conversation to comment negatively on the guy after he had left. The interesting thing is that I don't think either the Trump supporter or the lady beside me read me at all, in spite of the conversation being perilously close.
It is starting to sink in that I must be close to passing. It is a strange new feeling.
Other good things at the event: my former laser technician was there, so I got a hug and some good catching up with her. And I was able to keep my voice in the upper octave during the singing of "Oh Canada". It wouldn't do to sing baritone in public.
