For Laura

My wife dared me to perform the following task/project. I do not usually take on these challenges so easily, but I would like to write for a living someday and I saw it as a way to “break-in” with the Reedsy crowd. The day was almost over, and the glorious weekend was beginning. It is finally spring, and my wife and I were discussing what we wanted to do for dinner, since we could finally go outside, without masks, and enjoy the weather. Since this beautiful day, was ending with a perfect evening, my wife and I decided we would go to a classy, romantic restaurant near the beach on the New Jersey shore. It is 7 p.m. on a Friday. So, as the sun came down slowly, a big burning orange ball of light that ruled the sky until it set behind us. I always wished that it would set in front of us so we could see if it were glistening on the magnificent rolling blue-green water of the beachfront we were heading to. Living on the scenic Jersey shore, before we went out for a delicious feast and a barefoot walk on the white sandy beach, I said, “let me check my email, just one more time,” to my stunning, patient wife. I checked the email, against my better judgement, and low and behold, it was Laura from Reedsy asking if I wanted to write a short story and join in a contest for writing short stories. It was clearly wrong to keep my wonderful wife waiting, but she patiently waited since Laura threw down this gauntlet, and I saw and met up to the challenge. So, I trekked into my office, put on my glasses, sat down at my trusty computer, lit up my Word program and started cranking this story out. I wanted to write a story about gender acceptance, since, when I grew up, there were only two genders. Now there are four accepted genders, masculine, feminine, neuter, and common. I, some time ago, heard that Facebook has a list of more than 50 genders that a person can choose from when they initially sign up, or when they change their mind about which gender they are choosing. I chose to use a zoom call to my son since we are in Covid-19 times. There are many ways in which a person identifies and/or expresses their gender so I turned to my gay son whom I love very much for his thoughts and debate skills. We have different morals, different points of view, a different style for living our lives, but he is the perfect person to share conflicting views with. Father and son relationships are one of the most underrated situations ever in history. It is not the same as the security a father, daughter relation has, or the intimacy a mother, son relationship does, A large share of this relationship is expressed passively. Here action speaks louder than words. It's a bond made of scolding, learning, teaching, and, guiding. At times it is speaking your heart out.

When a boy is at a young age, his dad is his beginning teacher. He teaches him all he knows and works feverishly to make him a "man" worthy to be on his own in this environment. A father is there for his son to support and teach him to fight for his territory, to be confident and strong. I always kept my distance and let him live in the dream that whenever he won it was on his own. He never knew or realized that his daddy stood behind him like a shadow to support him in ways he could not imagine.

A gender identity that is generally considered by society to be a match, is the biological sex assigned at birth. Although gender has not felt or looked the same in every place, all the time, in the last few centuries gender has developed vastly divided. There are two opposing viewpoints. If a male, you must dress, look, and act, by a certain set of rules and regulations. If a female, you have to dress, look, and act, according to a completely other set of rules. In a society which is CIS normative, patriarchal, and binary, one’s gender is a form of social order and categorization. It commands how we responses to and treat other. The gender we know covers a big range of interfaces. One example is holding a door open for a woman or pulling back a chair. One does not do it for a man. It might look like labelling a woman’s emotions irrational when she is mad or upset. Not for a man. Add in the sexism that women face in our patriarchal gender world, that rigidity of the binary gender penalizes those who do not fit into gender expectations. This comes out in transphobia. Trans women face sexism and misogyny as both women and trans people, they are at a perilous intersection of identity. My son has much different views and he is not afraid to tell them to me in a forceful manner. “One world, one race, one gender,” he always says. We fight about trans-gender sports and what it means for girls. Sometimes our fights escalate into me wanting to hang up on him, but I never do. After all, he always tells me “I’m the one who is going to choose your nursing home dad.” Sometimes he and are like oil and water, sometimes we are like peanut butter and jelly. Our love makes us bond, but my son will not own up to it. Although I was brought up with a conservative point of view, I always concede to his point of view for two reasons. One, I learn from it and, two, I am tired of hearing him say, “Because I said so.” So now, my story concludes having used ALL the prompts that Laura challenged me to use, since I could not decide among them all. I hope that I win, if I do not, mice will come and eat my socks. I know being new to Reedsy the throngs do not want that to happen. After all we are a family of literary geniuses and I am feeling it.

                                                                                                                               Jeffrey C. Brown