Friday's Guest RERUN: Heather Jones, "It Comes Around"

Maybe it’s a coincidence or because I write fiction, but I believe everything happens for a reason, and the synchronicity of encounters like these mystifies me and fills me with wonder.

He that would make his own liberty secure,

must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty,

he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

—Thomas Paine

This winter, I had an exchange with a North Carolina lineman who came up to Maine to help with our storm outages, and called me sir.

I didn’t know he was from North Carolina when I stepped out of my house to speak to him. He’d parked his two-ton bucket truck in my driveway and was waiting for a crew to complete a repair further up the line so he could restore power to my house. We’d been without electricity for three days, so his presence was quite welcome and much appreciated.

I said hello and he replied. When I heard his voice I knew I was talking to someone from the South.

It felt kind of funny because I’m from the South, and I know what I look like to people from there. A lot of them look at me and see a man pretending to be a woman. They see a pervert. They see someone dangerous to children. They see it so bad that they pass laws in their states to discourage people like me from moving freely in society.

I know this because, being raised down there, I was taught to see people that way, too.

Not that I had anything to worry about from this sharp, professional young lineman.

What his accent told me in that moment was that he had left the warm comfort of his home, maybe a cheery wife and a couple toe-headed rugrats with chocolate milk in their hair, to travel up here to ice-encrusted Maine to stomp around in the woods cutting tree branches and rebuilding utility poles in the still-falling snow and bracing wind.

I had nothing but gratitude for this young man.

What I worried about was the awkwardness he might have been feeling at being surprised in the woods by a male-bodied human wearing ladies earrings and a long skirt.

He’d surely been warned he might run into people like me—someone living in a state that recently passed a law to protect us from people in his state who were passing laws against us. If he found it awkward, he moved past it. We spoke briefly in the comfortable style of Southerners, with which we were both familiar. Then I said my last “Thank you,” and, turning to walk back into the house, heard his automatic reply: “Yes, sir.”

Which was fine. I’m on this transition journey to change me, not anyone else. When people call me ma’am, they’re doing me a kindness. If they can’t do that, or won’t, then I’ll do them a kindness by looking past it. As long as kindness prevails, that’s the important thing.

But it seemed to bother him that he called me “sir.” He looked back at me, at my skirt, and said, “I mean, er…,” and then his voice broke off. He grimaced and turned away, walked back to his truck.

I brightly said, “No worries,” but I don’t know if he heard me. I didn’t know if he grimaced because he was worried he might’ve insulted me, or if he was irritated that he’d been put in a situation where he was expected to go against obvious reality, to play along with someone’s delusion, to “call a man a woman, or whatnot.”

By the friendliness of our exchange up to that point, I judge it was the first one. Being from the South, I knew he wasn't saying “Yes, sir,” but yessir.

There’s a difference.

Yessir is a quick, crisp sound that older Southern men expect to hear from young men as a sign of respect. It’s a sound that flies off a Southerner’s chin, automatically, as I said, because to a growing boy in the South, there is no yes—and definitely no yeah—when addressing an older man. It’s a yessir, or it’s your ass. Say yeah to the wrong football coach and you’ll run laps ‘til the cows come home. What that yessir meant in that moment in the woods of Maine was that this young lineman perceived me as a man, and on that basis, regardless of appearance or personal feelings, he treated me with respect.

I spent the rest of the day thinking, That boy has a good heart. I hope his mama knows that and it makes her proud.

The funny thing about this exchange is that I had the exact same encounter many years ago when I was in the Navy, except that time I stood in the young man’s shoes.

Back then, I had a wife and we lived in a studio apartment near Seattle. We needed some furniture, and I, a budding woodworking hobbyist, decided to build a futon. In our living room. I used a circular saw to cut the pine boards I bought from Home Depot, but a few of them were too long for that saw. I called around and found a local woodworker with a table saw who was willing to cut them for me. I loaded them in my truck and drove to his shop.

When I arrived, he walked out to greet me, but he seemed nervous when shaking my hand. I told him I was the guy who needed help cutting some lumber, unsure why the mood had changed since we spoke on the phone.

He nodded, said he remembered the call from twenty minutes ago. He wasn't confused about who I was.

“Are you going to hurt me?” he asked.

I was confused. “Why would I hurt you?”

He nodded at my truck. “Your license plate. You’re from Texas.”

“Yeah? Why would that mean I’m going to hurt you?”

Almost in a whisper, he replied, “Because I’m gay.” He said it as if I was supposed to know that by looking at him, but he just looked like a regular person to me.

I remember thinking, Well, it ain't obvious. If you’re that worried, you should just keep it to yourself.

But it was a strange emotion I had in that moment: humiliation, mixed with compassion, and a strong desire to connect, to protect. I realized immediately that his caution was warranted. I recalled a conversation among some of my fellow sailors in which one of us had said, “I wouldn’t have a problem beating the shit out of a homosexual if he hit on me,” and the next person had say, “I wouldn’t have a problem beating the shit out of one just for standing there.”

I knew this gay Seattle woodworker had nothing to fear from me, but I felt terrible for what I represented to him, and at the same, guilty, because I knew I’d helped create that image of Texans by the way I had acted as a kid growing up there.

I said, “No, sir, I’m not going to hurt you. I'm grateful for your help. And I believe everyone’s a sinner. None of us has the right to judge.”

I said it earnestly, but he winced. I was very racist and homophobic when I left Texas, and I departed from those attitudes in gradual steps. The step I took that day was from being someone who would have fought for this man if anyone attacked him for being gay, to someone who understood that his sexual orientation was not sinful.

Maybe it’s a coincidence or because I write fiction, but I believe everything happens for a reason, and the synchronicity of encounters like these mystifies me and fills me with wonder. I was given the gift of repeating a long ago experience, but I now stood in the opposite role. Like in a movie plot or a dream. Now, I was the gay man in the woods; I was receiving a visit from a young man in a big truck, signaling his affiliation with people who would hurt me if they could get their hands on me.

I wasn’t worried that this North Carolina lineman would hurt me, but I did hope the exchange would be a positive experience for all, like a meeting between ambassadors.

Because I know the universe has a way of drawing a circle around an idea for us, and saying, “Pay attention to this bit. Put some work into it.”

I wonder if the lineman will remember our exchange in twenty-five years. Will he think back on it from time to time as I have? Will it shape him? Will he become a force for change in his state such that those laws they’ve passed down there can be undone?

By his own reaction to his calling me sir, it appeared, at the very least, that the out-ness of transgender people is something he’s trying to get used to. Well, I sincerely appreciate his effort. And I wish him all the best.

And many thanks for getting the lights back on.

*. *. *. *. *

Heather Jones lives in Maine where she is a student in the Stonecoast MFA Program at USM. In her past lives, she has been a sailor, a dogmatist, an expatriate and a behavior analyst, and she’s still a father of four. She has a passion for literature and a love of writing, and a personal library of hundreds of books to which she hopes to add a few titles of her own soon.