David McElroy

I pass the sign every day and never notice it.

Stop.

But as I walked through my neighborhood late Tuesday night, my eyes were suddenly drawn to the crooked red sign. It grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. This is what I had been struggling for the last week to say.

Stop!

I’ve been in a funk for days, but I haven’t known exactly what was going on. I’ve felt angry. I’ve felt resentful. I’ve felt something powerful that needed to come out. Whatever it was has been strong enough to make me keep to myself more than usual. I’ve been slow to respond to phone calls and emails and everything else.

Stop! Everything needs to stop!

As I stood there in the street with this bright red sign screaming at me, something suddenly clicked. It wasn’t rational. It was an angry and chaotic desire to raise my voice here on this silent midnight street and demand that the insane world stop what it’s doing. I needed everyone to hear me.

I need this chaos to stop.

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I had my first existential crisis long before I knew what the words meant.

I was a 5-year-old in kindergarten. I remember being alone at the front of our house on Holly Hill Drive in Atlanta. Something in my little brain was trying to figure out my place in the world.

I can’t tell you why. I doubt normal 5-year-olds have such thoughts, but I seriously pondered who I was and whether I mattered. The questions hung heavy on my little heart, because I desperately needed to matter.

Suddenly, I had an answer that somehow made sense to me. I was 5 years old — and there were five people in my family — so that coincidence had to mean something. I must be important.

All of my life, I’ve experienced one crisis of this sort after another. The specific questions change, but they all mean the same thing.

Do I matter? Do I matter to you? Do I belong with you? Are you my home? Can I trust you to love me?

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Even when I was a child, my Aunt Bessie seemed impossibly old.

She was actually my great aunt, but I knew her better than either of my actual aunts. After we moved to Jasper, Ala., so my father could take care of his aging parents, I spent a lot of time at her house. Her husband, Uncle Larkin, had been sick and somewhat cranky all my life, so I spent far more time with her than with him.

Aunt Bessie seemed like the cheapest woman on Earth. She shopped at stores that sold goods with some sort of flaw, because she said it was the only way to get a bargain. She ate the cheapest cuts of meat imaginable. She was incredibly frugal.

Most of all, though, she almost never threw anything away. It didn’t matter whether it was a rubber band or a scrap of fabric or a piece of string. She would store such junk away and say quietly, “I might need it someday.”

Aunt Bessie was only 24 years old when the Great Depression started, but it left an imprint on her which I never understood — and I fear we’re all about to learn what fear taught her.

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