David McElroy

As I walked down a crowded hallway Friday afternoon, I saw a very attractive young woman coming toward me. Our eyes met for what had to have been a fraction of a second, but in that moment, time slowed down and there didn’t seem to be anybody else in the hallway other than the two of us.

Her blue eyes were warm, intelligent and open. In some way that I can’t explain, I knew what she was unconsciously communicating: “I’m interested in you. I’d like to talk with you.”

The moment was gone as quickly as it arrived, and we were going in opposite directions. The encounter left me slightly shaken and wanting to understand what had just happened.

I was inside a very busy large hospital in downtown Birmingham — it was UAB for any local people who are curious — and I was looking for a specific place where some information was supposed to have been posted. The instructions I had been given were very vague, so I had stopped several times to ask for help from employees.

I put the woman out of my mind and continued looking for what I’d come to find. The odds of me ever seeing her again — just a random stranger among thousands in a hospital — were tiny. So I moved on and figured I’d think about it later. I went back to a lounge next to a cafeteria on the second floor, where I’d been told I’d find what I was looking for.

I suddenly saw her standing alone in that lounge. She was looking at her phone, but she glanced at me several times from across the room.

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I’ve known for a long time that the people who played the crew of the starship Enterprise when I was a small child are getting old, but it still caught me by surprise Monday night to see a picture of a very old-looking Leonard Nimoy with the news that he has been hospitalized for severe chest pain.

When the celebrities of our youth grow old and start dying, we feel pangs of something. Is it regret? sadness? or something else? I’m not sure what to call it, but the feelings are ultimately about ourselves, not about the people who are dying.

James Doohan (Scotty) and DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) are already gone. Nimoy (Spock) and William Shatner (Capt. Kirk) are old men. What does this say about me?

I know it sounds selfish to interpret someone else’s problems this way, but isn’t that natural? I didn’t know any of these people except as actors whose faces and voices were burned into my child brain. They only have meaning as reminders of the little boy who wanted to join them in space — away from the reality that seemed so unhappy down here.

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At a gym where I go, there’s another member who makes me very uncomfortable.

The guy is about 30 years old and he has no apparent understanding of social boundaries. He talks to everybody in intrusive ways. He’s constantly repeating things that don’t seem appropriate to be talking about in public. He’s been known to open curtains in the showers to randomly talk with people.

Employees at the place tell me that people have complained about him and his family has been warned that people find him creepy and intrusive. He makes me very uncomfortable.

After he came through the locker room when I was in there Thursday morning — stopping to talk with people as though each were a trusted old friend — I found myself talking to a couple of guys after he was gone. We were speculating about what his issue might be — something on the autism spectrum was our best guess — and one of the guys mentioned that he had grown up across the street from him. He said the guy’s parents were strange, so maybe it was some sort of family lunacy.

After that brief chat, I walked into the shower feeling a deep sense of relief. I was surprised to realize that I felt relieved simply because I’d had another conversation with people who validated my feelings about the guy. The unspoken subtext of the conversation was, “That guy is weird. He’s not normal like we are. There’s something wrong with him. We’re the ones who are OK.”

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