David McElroy

I always find myself re-evaluating my direction at the end of each year. It’s an inward-looking exercise in navel-gazing, but it serves a broader purpose.

When we get stuck on the wrong course in life, it’s hard to change that. But it’s almost impossible to make the change unless we’re willing to be honest with ourselves about where we are. If we can see what we‘re doing to ourselves, we have a chance of making a correction. If not, we’re doomed to stay on the wrong course for life.

I’ve been conducting my annual year-end evaluation over the last few days. Oddly, I have two image stuck in my mind, one from the past and one from the future.

The first image relates to some advice my ex-wife gave me many years ago. I’ve always known she was right, but I’ve never quite figured out what to do with it. This year, I can’t get it out of my mind.

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I was about 14 years old when this photo was taken, so my sisters would have been about 12 and 10. That’s Mary on the left and Rebecca on the right, mugging for the camera with someone else’s sunglasses.

I clearly don’t want to be in the photo. Mary seems ambivalent and Rebecca is having fun with it. Something about this seems like a good symbol of my childhood. We were all in the same places and going through the same experience for those years — but we reacted to it in radically different ways.

Even though it’s been decades, I can’t seem to leave that time in my life completely behind. I spent about 90 minutes this afternoon talking with Rebecca about some issues on her mind. It was surprising how many of today’s issues required one of us to ask, “Do you remember when…”

Even though my sisters and I have gone in very different directions — and we have almost nothing to do with one another anymore — we still can’t escape the drama and dysfunction of where we all started.

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It was 19 years ago this week that a powerful tornado slammed into Tuscaloosa, Ala., and killed 11 people. One of the most powerful images from the aftermath of that tragedy was this photo of a man carrying what appeared to be the lifeless figure of a small child from the rubble of her home.

The picture was shot by a Tuscaloosa News photographer and it appeared in newspapers around the world after it was carried by the Associated Press wire. The man is Michael Harris and the little girl is 6-year-old Whitney Crowder.

For years, I had assumed she died that day, but I found out Monday that she is alive and has a happy family of her own.

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