David McElroy

Until Wednesday night, I hadn’t seen Larry for roughly 30 years. When we were in high school, we seemed to be inseparable. He was my best friend. And we were close collaborators on all sorts of projects — at school, at church and in our personal lives.

This image is from the newspaper staff photo in our senior yearbook. I was the editor and he was the news editor. That was his title, but everybody knew that it really meant “second in command” for the entire staff, regardless of department.

In college, he was in Birmingham and I was in Tuscaloosa, but we still saw each other quite a bit. After that, though, we went in very different directions. We never had a falling out. We were simply busy with very different lives. I stayed in the South — mostly in Alabama — and he ended up in Washington, D.C.

He’s home to visit his mother for Christmas this week, so we had dinner Wednesday night and talked for three hours. We could have talked much longer, but we were the last ones in the restaurant and the staff made it pretty obvious they were ready to leave.

As I drove home, I reflected on how I felt to see him and to look back on our joint past through the lens of our present lives. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, it suddenly occurred to me that I had been unconsciously terrified in high school about whether people would like me — and I somehow never worried about that with Larry. That gave me a new appreciation for something I’d never before considered.

And then Thursday night, a woman I barely know randomly told me that everybody likes me — and that everybody thought I was a joy to be around — so I’ve been thinking all night about the strange coincidence of these two contradictory pieces of information.

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