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.

Keep Reading

I hadn’t seen Angie for several years. When I had first known her — about five or six years ago — she had been a straight-laced college student working her way through a nursing program. When I saw her this week, everything had changed.

The last time I had bumped into her, it had been about three years ago. She had been in a restaurant on a Sunday evening with a group of people from her church. She had seemed happy and content — looking and acting the part of a beautiful young woman with a bright future ahead of her.

This week, though, everything was different. She’s pregnant. She’s miserable. She told me the father-to-be disappeared as soon as she told him she was pregnant. The guy was immediately living with another woman and wants nothing to do with the baby.

A female friend who was with Angie that night started telling me about the man who helped bring our mutual friend to this point. Between the two of them, they painted a picture of a loser — an arrest record, drug habits, bad character, no future — who Angie had put up with for no good reason.

As I listened to their story, things seemed obvious. Angie had lowered her standards a little bit at first. She had lied to herself about what the man was. She let him lead her — one little step at a time — into things that had been completely foreign to her.

And now she’s alone and miserable. She slowly painted herself into a corner — one tiny bad decision at a time — and now she sees no way out of the hole into which she dragged herself.

Keep Reading

I found myself in a time machine Monday night. My body didn’t move, but my mind and my heart were transported to the years when I was a teen-ager.

I didn’t mean to take this trip into the past. I ran across a YouTube video promising snippets of the most popular song from every month of the decade of my youth. I was curious whether I’d know all the songs. It never occurred to me that the music would awaken something disturbing.

At first, I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Then the songs reached the years when I was about 14, 15 and 16.

All of a sudden, I was feeling emotions I had experienced during those years. Some of the sounds awakened specific memories. My mind was a blur. What I didn’t expect was the flood of emotions.

I can talk clinically about the experience of growing up with a narcissistic father and an absent mother. I can outline the ways this affected me, but I almost always talk about it with the matter-of-fact tone of reciting facts.

What I felt tonight wasn’t about reason or psychology or dry narrative. It was a flood of feelings such as fear and shame and pain. They were emotions I was too terrified to openly feel at the time.

Keep Reading