David McElroy

Laura’s face was covered in pain, but she never let herself cry. I’ve known her for more than a decade, but I’d never known her to be happy until the past year. After a previous marriage in which she was misunderstood and lonely, she had finally found real love. Now she was telling me that Daniel was dead.

It’s a raw slice of life that I don’t see very often, so I found it both moving and painful to talk with Laura Sunday afternoon. Her husband of barely more than a year had been dead for a couple of weeks from an auto accident, but I was just finding out about it. Things like this always affect me, but not nearly as much as it affected Laura.

“All my life, I’d been looking for love and I was lucky to find it,” she said. “I was searching all my life, but I don’t regret the wasted years now, because I don’t feel like I lived for nothing. Before Daniel, I felt like, ‘Why am I here?’ Now, it’s different. I fulfilled my dreams and accomplished the love I wanted. There’s nothing I really want to live for now.”

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The newly triumphant rebels in Libya have decided one of their very first priorities is rounding up blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and sticking them into makeshift jails. The men being held claim they’re just innocent migrant workers, but the rebels claim they were actually mercenary fighters for the regime of Moammar Gadhafi.

Just last week, we talked about how the rebels were turning out to be murderous thugs, but it turns out that they’re being even more systematic about their thuggery than we thought, because it’s now racial.

There are almost always unintended consequences when one nation sticks its nose into another nation’s business, so that’s not unusual in itself. But how ironic is it that the first black U.S. president is largely responsible for black Africans being unjustly imprisoned in a country he just worked hard to destabilize?

When William showed up about 13 years ago, he was an amazingly confident kitten. He had been wandering the neighborhood for days when my ex-wife brought him inside and declared that someone had to take care of this little guy.

He was tiny then, but he was already a lion in his own mind. He walked right up to the older cats in the household and let them know there was a new sheriff in town. His dominant and fearless attitude earned him the name of William — after William the Conqueror.

There’s little he won’t get into. He has talented paws that are especially suited to opening drawers. Since he enjoys finding soft clothes to sleep on, he has a long habit of opening drawers and setting up shop on top of the clothes for a long nap. Here’s an example of his handiwork. He always jumps up and looks innocent after he’s been caught.

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