It’s great to visit Memory Lane, but it’s fatal to try to live there

By David McElroy · July 20, 2019

I took a shortcut Friday afternoon from my office to my barber shop that took me through an industrial area where I used to spend a lot of time.

I hadn’t been on that part of Oxmoor Road in Homewood for about 15 years. Several of the printing companies I used to deal with — when I was a political consultant — are located in the area, so I was flooded with memories of late-night visits to do press-checks on mail pieces for my clients.

I printed dozens of jobs at Craftsman Printing right over there. Across from them was the old building where PressTech used to be before the owner — a man who did me more favors than I can count — unexpectedly killed himself on the press floor late one night.

My memory was flooded with faces and images and sensations of my time in the area. Part of me enjoyed the sweetly bitter sensation of experiencing a past which is now dead, but another part of me wanted to leave the area and never return. And then I had a sudden thought.

Memory Lane is a one-way street — and it’s a dead end.

I’ve reinvented myself half a dozen times during my career. I never planned such a path, but it has seemed entirely natural to me. I’ve been thinking about this for the last day — and I realize that every time I reinvent myself, I cut ties to who I’ve been and where I’ve been — and I leave that past behind.

Every time I start over, I have to cut my past off. I didn’t quite realize that until now. Most people seem to build a new stage of their lives on the framework of their previous stage, but I do it differently.

I sail a ship to a new place — metaphorically speaking — and then I burn the ship so that I have no way of going back.

As I’ve thought about this today, I’ve tried to think about reconnecting with places and people from my past — and the thought almost makes me shudder. I’m not angry with people from the past. I don’t have anything against the places I’ve been part of. But I’m so focused on where I’m going that memories of the past seem almost like burdens.

I don’t go to high school or college reunions. I’ve mentioned this before. I have no objection to the idea of reunions and I’m not angry with anybody from the past. They just don’t seem relevant to where I’m going.

I don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing with people I’ve worked with in the past. I know a lot of people who do that. Many of them are so full of memories that they spend their careers trying to recreate some fabled time from their youth. But nothing about the past is relevant to what I want to do now.

I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. The core part of me is the same. My values are the same. But I’ve shed a lot of masks and costumes which I used to hide behind. I’ve left behind a lot of things which don’t seem to matter anymore.

It sometimes surprises me to notice what I was reading, listening to and thinking about just 10 years ago. The changes in me have been very gradual, but the end result is that I’m very different from the person I used to be.

I have a lot of respect for my past. I would like to be able to take my future wife to places from my past and show her where I was shaped and what I did in those places. I’d like to take her to the newsroom of a small daily newspaper and say, “This is where I sat when I edited stories every day. This is where we put the pages together. This is where I checked the papers coming off the press.”

I’d like to do that with a number of places. I’d like to take her to the campus of the University of Alabama and show her where I had classes, where I used to station myself to watch people, where specific things that mattered happened to me.

I’d like for her to take me to the places the matter to her. I’d like to visit her hometown and her high school and her college and all the places that helped shape who she is.

Understanding the past — for yourself and your partner — can be very important to understanding how the present came about. But living there will make you stagnant. It will prevent you from moving forward.

I’m in a dynamic period right now when I’m thrashing about in an attempt to reinvent myself again. I don’t know exactly where it will be or who I’ll be with or what I’ll be doing. I have some clues, but I don’t know for sure.

Whatever it is, I know I will leave the dead past behind — where it belongs. My eyes are on the future and another reinvention. That’s where the excitement of life is, not in the past.

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In the Birmingham suburb of Hueytown, the Golden Gophers of Hueytown High School had just defeated the Eufala Tigers in the second round of the state playoffs Friday night. It’s not a game that will mean a lot to anybody outside those two communities, but it meant everything to the players and coaches involved. After the game, Hueytown defensive coordinator Trent Campbell was celebrating with his victorious players when he noticed Eufala offensive lineman Dallas Ingram distraught and alone. Campbell left his players to console the distraught Ingram and photographer Dennis Victory caught photos of the pair together. “My reaction was to go see about him, because I’ll see my guys on Sunday and next week and the rest of their high school careers, but that’s a young man we watched on film for a week and studied and he’s a fantastic player,” Campbell said later. “And it wasn’t too long ago when I played my last high school football game and I know what that feeling is and you sort of never forget that. I went to tell him what a great player I thought he was and what a great game I thought they played and I wish nobody had to lose that night because it was an incredible game.” This is what sports at the high school level should be about. Winning is great and winning is fun. But humanity and decency last longer.

I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

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