You know things are getting bad when the Canadians (and others) start treating us like we treat foreigners. The other day I walked to my local pizza joint to grab a pie. On the patio, while waiting, I tried to ignore the loud conversation to my right between two men in their early 30s, one of whom was wearing white-framed sunglasses. I can ignore a loud conversation up to a certain point. Then I lose my shit. In this case, it didn’t help that there was a stream of curse words with emphasis on various forms of the word “fuck.” One look at the toddler in the high chair to my left and I steamed over to the table.
“Enough with the ‘fuckings’, I loud whispered. “If you have to talk like that go the fuck some other place. Leave.”
Before the two men had a chance to respond, the waitress materialized out of nowhere.
“You’re the one that needs to leave,” she said. “You can’t talk like that to my tables.”
I was a little stunned. I had rather thought of myself as a sort of patio hero. Plus, I was one of her “tables” as well, wasn’t I?
“But,” I stammered, “they were cursing, loudly! What about the children?” I gestured feebly to the toddler in the high chair.
This is when the bald Canadian with eyes a little too close together but otherwise handsome came to my rescue.
“No, he is right. We’ll keep it down.”
I went back to my table.
I found out he was Canadian after, when we had a brief conversation about the book I was reading. (Oh, global warming? Yeah, I read that years ago.) His companion, it turns out, was from Argentina. They made regular trips to Albuquerque to “work on their Spanish.”
Here they were, foreigners in the United States, a thousand miles north of San Carlos and not giving a fuck who heard. And the waitress still has their back?
I’m sorry, but that’s a little fucked.