David McElroy

The weather’s been miserable here. We went through a bitterly cold period a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had a couple of other times when strong storms came through, thrashing us with heavy wind and deluging us with rain. By southern standards, it’s been a bad winter.

All the trees around my house look bare and lifeless. My back yard is littered with limbs and branches that I haven’t yet cleared away, debris from a couple of the recent storms. There’s one large tree branch — the one you see above — that crashed down one evening so close that it almost hit my house.

I was in the back yard Sunday afternoon looking at all the debris and the bare trees when I realized that what I was looking at matched the sour mood I’ve been feeling. It seems as though my heart has been experiencing winter for a long time. And then I remembered a simple question from an old song.

“Can you stand the weather — if winter lasts forever?”

And I don’t know how much more winter my heart can stand.

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I know a woman who’s exhausted with her life. She’s unhappy. She’s sort of numb. She told me tonight that everything in her life went downhill after she had two children with the wrong man.

I jokingly asked this 42-year-old why she would choose the wrong man to get stuck with, but she took it as a serious question.

“He seemed good enough at the time,” she said. “I didn’t expect much and I thought maybe he would get better. I never really loved him, but I thought he was better than nothing at all. That was stupid. He was a terrible husband and a complete dud as a father.”

I felt sorry for her, but there was also a smug little part of me which thought, “I’d never allow myself to get stuck with someone I didn’t love.”

And then I remembered something. I almost did the same thing.

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I was very confident, but I was also nervous. It was hard to say which feeling was stronger.

I was sitting in an auditorium on a late Saturday morning about 16 years ago. The auditorium was full. Maybe 600 people? 800? I don’t recall. We were waiting for a block of short films to start showing at the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival in Birmingham. Most people were there to watch films. I was there to finally find out whether an audience liked my own first film.

My companion that morning was a girlfriend with whom I had a complicated relationship. Things didn’t end well for us, but I’ll always be grateful for her support that day.

I was nervous by the time the lights dimmed for the first short to start. My film was about the fourth in line, so I sat through several others first. I had never been to a film festival before, so I had just assumed the films would be good. I couldn’t tell anybody — because it would have sounded prideful — but I thought the other films were mostly terrible.

My film finally started. I held my breath. Would they laugh? We got to the first punchline. The audience roared with laughter. I was so happy that I wanted to cry.

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