Allyship
Good Neighbors: A Story From the Suburbs
From a conversation with my dad
I’ve been having a weird bout of vertigo this week, so my dad drove me to the doctor’s office. As we sat in the waiting area, he told me a story, starting with, “I wish you had been there to help me.”
My dad has a big vegetable garden right next to the street, just past a low wire fence. People from the neighborhood regularly stop and talk with him. He was working in the garden the other day when he looked up and thought he recognized one of the neighbors.
There’s a house behind the garden where a family with two kids has lived for probably 15 years. When the kids were little, their mom would bring them to the garden to visit my dad. He’s always shared garden vegetables with this family, and they’ve helped him out with stuff, too.
So he was working in the garden the other day and thought he saw one of the kids walking home from high school, except instead of a girl with long blonde hair, he saw someone with short dark hair. Something else looked different, too, like a more angular face.
He called out the girl’s name, with a question mark on the end.
The teenager stopped and looked at him. “Yes,” they said, “except I go by [masculine name] now.”
