Earning the affection of a child changes his world — and yours

By David McElroy · May 24, 2016

I had just gotten out of my car at home Tuesday afternoon. I was in a hurry, but I heard a child’s singsong voice before I could make it into the house.

“Where are you going?”

It was my 5-year-old neighbor, Derrick. He likes to come visit my dog, Lucy, when I have her out. He also likes to come sit on my porch and talk with me. It doesn’t matter much to him what we talk about. He also loves other neighborhood animals, including a calico cat named Bella, whose family moved away a couple of weeks ago. (As you can see in the picture, Bella tolerated him. Just barely.)

“I have some work I have to get done,” I told him. “I have to go inside.”

“Oh,” he said with quiet disappointment.

I looked down at him and he was staring at the ground. He had pushed his bike over to my house and he just stood there next to me for a moment before he suddenly spoke.

“Can you fix my bike?”

I’m not a very mechanical person, so I knew it was very unlikely that I could help. But he seemed to need something. Honestly, it didn’t really seem as though it was about the bike as much as it was about my attention.

Derrick’s parents split up a month or so back. He’s taken it really hard. He’s been crying easily lately. When the smallest thing happens to him — a minor cut or scrape — he screams, “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”

His dad is in Florida now. I don’t know the details. It’s none of my business. Derrick and his 6-year-old brother might be better off without their father. Maybe. Who can really say for sure? But all Derrick knows is that the man he had relied on as his male parent figure was gone. And it’s been confusing to him.

Derrick is a sweet boy. In addition to his love of animals, I saw it recently in the week after I was diagnosed with pulmonary emboli. He heard from someone — his mom, I assume — that I was sick. So one afternoon, he brought me flowers that he picked from the yard. He heard you’re supposed to give flowers to sick people to help them get well.

“Derrick, I doubt I can fix your bike, but I’ll take a look. What’s wrong with it?”

He showed me that the chain had come off. I asked him how long it had been off. He said it had been several weeks, but you never know how accurate his frame of reference might be for time.

Even though I’m not very mechanical, it was easy to put the chain back on. I just had to put one end in place, then put the other end partly in place, and then move the pedal backward until the chain snapped into the correct position. Then the bike was fixed.

Derrick’s face lit up. He couldn’t believe it.

“You fixed my bike?!”

It was half exclamation and half question, as though he couldn’t believe it had been that easy. I showed him that the pedals turned the wheel now.

He threw his arms around my legs and hugged whatever he could reach around my mid-section. He held on tight for a minute.

“Can you fix my brother’s bike, too?”

We walked across the street to his house. The same thing was wrong with his brother’s bike and I fixed it.

“Let’s race!” Derrick called out to his brother, Eric, and they took off in the street on two functioning bikes.

Their mom was on the porch of their house and she thanked me.

The entire experience didn’t take more than 10 minutes. Probably less than that. But for Derrick, his world was suddenly right. I couldn’t bring his dad back. I couldn’t fix the hole in his heart for something he longed for. But for those few minutes, I was his hero.

There are a lot of things I could have done with my time this afternoon, but nothing I could have done would have mattered as much as giving a loving little boy some affection and help.

Really, though, he’s not the one who will remember this. I figure he’ll forget. But I’ll always remember the way he made me feel.

I’ll always remember the feeling of respect and affection — how those tiny arms gave me that huge hug of appreciation. I’ll never forget the warmth in my heart from having made a little boy happy for a moment.

There are few things better than having a child believe — at least for a few minutes — that you’re the one who can fix his entire world.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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