Youth and death are life’s bookends pointing toward the truth between

By David McElroy · September 7, 2017

I had come to the restaurant to write. The place was mostly empty in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I should have gotten a lot of writing done, but Robert had other ideas.

Robert is a talker. His dad works in the kitchen of the restaurant and had been called in to finish someone else’s shift, so Robert tagged along to wait for him. He quickly struck up a conversation with me.

Robert is in the third grade and he wanted to tell me all about his life. He’s a golfer, he said, but people frequently ask him whether he’s a quarterback on a football team. He and his family have five cats and the one called Boo Bear is is favorite. (Boo Bear sleeps with him.) He’s going to be a firefighter or maybe “something easy” like a landscaper.

There was nothing extraordinary about Robert’s story, but everything about this sweet kid sparkled with life and wit and happiness. That such a thing is so ordinary is extraordinary in itself.

I’m not exactly sure whether children gravitate to me or whether I gravitate to them, but I constantly seem to end up interacting with them. In another restaurant this week, I had another “ordinary extraordinary” encounter.

As I ate dinner Tuesday night, I met a 19-month old blonde girl named Olivia. She was shamelessly flirting with me from the next booth, but her good-natured mother told her she’s too young for me. As she left the restaurant in her mom’s arms, she whipped her head back around toward me — swinging the red bow in her hair into her mother’s face — and waved her little hand at me and called out, “Bye! Bye! Bye!”

That sweet little lady made me smile.

On Wednesday night, I briefly met another little blonde girl. (What is it about little blonde girls lately?) As I ate that night, a tiny little girl — barely old enough to walk slowly with her mother holding her hand — came walking by on their way to the restroom. As she got to my table, the girl stopped and wouldn’t go on, even though her mother tugged her hand just a bit. She just stared at me. I spoke to her and she smiled. Her eyes got big and she smiled more. Her mother seemed confused.

“She seems to want to stay here and have a conversation with you,” her mom said. “She’s never done this before.”

The little girl never said anything, but she just kept grinning. Her mom finally picked her up and they went on. When they came out of the restroom, she waved to me and grinned again as she left in her mother’s arms.

Something about these little encounters fills me with joy.

I was thinking about my encounters with children Thursday evening as I listened to an interview with “visual storyteller” Maira Kalman, whose work you might have seen in the New York Times and it various other places. There’s a lot in her interview I’m still thinking about — and I recommend that On Being interview to you — but I was struck by her fascination with death.

Kalman said she starts every morning by reading the obituaries in a newspaper. She doesn’t seem like a morbid woman and she sounded quite happy with her life. So why does she start each day by reading about death?

She said it’s because it gives her clarity about what matters in her life — trees, walks and all the little things that we fall in love with every day.

As soon as she said that, I realized I do the same thing, but I do it by focusing on the early part of life and the end. I’m drawn to children for what they teach me about being alive — and I’m drawn to thinking about death for what that teaches me about the parts of life between childhood and death.

As this realization hit me, I thought about part of a song that expresses the idea beautifully. In a song from 1984 called “Man of Steel,” singer/songwriter Pat Terry has an emotionally powerful metaphor for this. In part, he’s lamenting that he has to be a “man of steel” in order to survive in “a world gone mad.” But the rest of this verse gets more complicated:

It’s a typical day for the man of steel
A little happy and a little bit sad
Seems like a reasonable way to feel
For a man in a world gone mad
There’s a baby that’s bouncing on his daddy’s knee
Grinning like the world’s his own
There’s a Cadillac climbing a cold, dark hill
To a grave with a fresh-placed stone
And the man of steel has a gleam in his eye for the innocent one
And the man of steel has a lump in his throat for a loved one gone
And the man of steel has hope in his heart for anyone
Who can see what’s true between the two and carry on

In Pat Terry’s carefully constructed narrative, it’s easy to miss the point. He first talks about the baby “that’s bouncing on his daddy’s knee,” but then he abruptly switches to noticing a hearse climbing a cold, dark hill to a grave to bury someone who’s died. Why the sudden shift from a joyful image to one of death?

Terry tells us that he has a gleam in his eye for the child and a lump in his throat for the dead person — and here’s where it all comes together — but hope in his heart for anyone in this world who can see the truth between these extremes — and and who can choose to carry on with this thing we call life.

That’s what I’m doing when I interact joyfully with these children. That’s what I’m doing when I somberly read death notices of people I don’t know and I wonder about their lives.

I’m reminding myself that everything I have is in the gap between those two. I’m reminding myself that I’m obsessed with finding the truth about what this life is. I’m reminding myself that life is perfect and joyful and full of hope at the beginning — full of absolute innocence — but I’m also reminding myself that it always ends.

I am terrified to live in a world where people act as though they have forever to start living. I’m shattered to live in a world where so many people seem oblivious to the joy and innocence of childhood. I feel like shaking people and saying, “Don’t you know that if you don’t change what you’re doing, you’re going to wake up one day and find you’ve wasted your life — and you’ve never even been happy?!”

Most of all, of course, I’m fearful of that for myself.

I’m fearful of not finding those things which will give life the most meaning for me. I’m fearful of not having a safe space within which to live out the love and connection which I know gives life meaning. I’m fearful of almost touching the things I need and then failing to win them.

Every child I meet is a promise of what life can be for me.

Every death I notice is a reminder that the clock is ticking for me.

In a world gone mad, I see the promise of life and the certainty of death. I see where I’m going in the end — many years from now — but I also see what life can be like in the meantime.

I see these extremes and I embrace them. I don’t know how to find the things I’m still desperately searching for, but I do know that I dimly see the truth of what’s between birth and death — and I consciously choose to carry on — with the innocent faith that love will win over death.

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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.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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