Personal Narrative: How Dad Changed My Life

“Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see,” Dad reiterated as I became a young woman. But growing up, I relied on what I could see, what I could touch, and what others shared with me. I held my peers and teachers words as peremptory and gained a sense of false dependence. As I entered my third year of high school this changed.
“I need you to translate what this man is saying,” Dad explained as he drove through our neighborhood. An older Hispanic man with a hat, long sleeves and jeans, an unusual outfit for the brutally hot month of August, sat on the curb and looked up at me with curiosity. Next to him was a garbage bag full of beer cans.
The man looked at me with confusion before he spoke. His heavy Spanish accent and slurred