One of my early memories I keep coming back to over the years is a Star Wars/Star Trek/Science Fiction “convention” at my local Barnes and Noble in 1999. I begged and pleaded with my mom to take me and while it was not a perfect memory, I keep coming back to it as a foundational experience. I was a kid who was into geek stuff, from watching animated comic-based cartoons, to finding comics wherever I could, to monthly trips to the bookstore with my mom. I didn’t grow up knowing about sci fi or comic conventions but now that I’ve gone to many, I think that very first experience was a microcosm of what a real convention would be like in my later years.
There were a few different tiny tables set up around with people selling books, and games. One of the most popular tables was for the new Star Wars Tales of the Jedi card game and the game company had set up tables with people teaching others to play. I sat down, and while I still didn’t understand or play that well, I was given some free swag (some of the only stuff I got being a poor kid). There was also a store wide trivia game about all kinds of sci fi lore, from Star Trek to Star Wars and other shows and books at that time I had not heard of (like Battlestar Galactica).
The entire event was a pretty good experience, but towards the end of the evening I decided to participate in some of the trivia. At that age I hadn’t developed that skill of remembering story details, like ship names and numbers and ranks of the characters. When I kept making mistakes, some in the crowd started to make fun of me and chased me off from the game. Not to be deterred, I went and found some books in the sci-fi/fantasy section and asked my mom if I could get them. My mom, knowing something was wrong, got me a Star Trek book I had picked out and had a talk with me on the way home. She brought it down to a very simple idea: “If you enjoy something like Star Trek and it makes you happy, no one has the right to tell you anything. You can be a fan as soon as you love something sincerely”.
It’s a life message that I still carry to this day. Sometimes when I have told that story in the past, people asked if I wished I had never gone or had never wanted to get exposed to an intense fandom that way. Now that I am older and can look back on the experience, nothing was going to stop me from the things in my life that resonate with me as a person; art, sci fi, and comics have always been there. Besides, I would never have had a talk with my mom about it to help mold my world view. No matter what crazy thing someone has said (be it in the past when I worked in comic retail or now about my writing career), that message from my mom helps those hurtful words fall right off my back. The little bit of pain in my younger life made me realize that any enjoyment of fandom brings a crazy amount of good to me, and of course like in all things there are some bad, but it is worth the love. Thanks Mom, and thanks to whoever put on that gathering years ago - it helped make a little part of me into who I am today.
