David McElroy

The older man at the next table looked a bit as though he was lost. I wouldn’t say he looked sad. He seemed more like a man who didn’t know where to go or what to do — almost like a little boy who had lost his parents. I had no idea that he had actually just lost his wife.

Jim and I struck up a casual conversation, but he didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm at first. If I hadn’t made a passing reference to his wife, I’m sure we wouldn’t have talked any further and I wouldn’t have learned his story. He had been sitting in a booth staring aimlessly out the window for close to an hour as I ate and wrote. Since I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring, I joked that his wife must have kicked him out of the house and he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“I buried my wife two weeks ago,” he said softly.

Jim is 72 years old and seemed to be in excellent health. His wife had developed some kind of cancer early last year and it moved into more critical organs as the year went along. He had known for months that she didn’t have much time left. It’s still a shock to have her gone, though. He said he doesn’t quite know what to do.

He had once had his own accounting practice, but he hadn’t really wanted to retire, so he had stuck around working part-time for others ever since he sold his firm. For his entire life, his work and his church activities have taken up the vast majority of his time. He seemed to have done well financially, but he started talking to me about the things that have been on his mind since he lost his wife.

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If you’re one of the millions of people watching the Super Bowl today, take a good look at that expensive stadium in which the game is being played — and then give thanks that you’re not unlucky enough to have been one of the suckers in Indiana who paid for the thing.

Lucas Oil Stadium cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $720 million to build. Local governments in the Indianapolis area have raised motel taxes, restaurant taxes and rental car taxes to pay for the stadium. The primary tenant of the stadium is the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, who pay only $250,000 a year for the place. (That amounts to just two thirds of the NFL’s minimum salary for the kind of unused player who stands on the sidelines and holds a clipboard.)

In addition to massive direct costs, local governments in the area have shelled out millions of dollars because of operating costs that weren’t covered in the original plan. (Another tax was added after the fact to cover that.) And financing costs went through the roof during construction because of the collapse of the sub-prime lending market.

When I look at this kind of boondoggle, I’m thankful that voters in the county where I live soundly rejected an insane plan to build a domed stadium in1998. The usual kind of downtown central planners came up with pie-in-the-sky plans that year for a domed stadium and a variety of other things. It was called the Metropolitan Area Projects Strategy (MAPS). It was a virtual wish list of everything that pretty much every local group wanted to build. Supporters of the plan were trying to buy support by spreading the cash around.

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I’ve thought all week about how I want to wrap this story up, and I’m still not sure. I’d hoped to have some profound point to make by now, but I don’t think I do. I’m not even sure how interesting it is.

For those who have asked, though, here’s how it went and what I remember along the way. It’s going to be pretty chronological and pretty stream-of-consciousness. And it’s going to be way too long. Most of it won’t interest you, I suspect.

As I got ready for surgery the day before, it didn’t feel real. In fact, the preparations I was making felt more like I feel before taking a trip. I had a checklist of what all had to get done — such as taking my dog, Lucy, over to a friend’s house to spend a couple of days — and I had to get to bed early in order to get up early. It was hard to go to sleep.

I was up at 4 a.m. As soon as the alarm went off, I was wide awake. It still didn’t feel real. I was on a schedule and I’d meet the schedule, but I still couldn’t really feel anything about it. A friend who lives nearby, Carole, took the day off from work to drive me to the hospital and wait around for me. My sister, Rebecca, had planned to come down from Nashville, but I asked her to wait until Tuesday. I was taking up Carole’s Monday, so I figured Rebecca could take over on Tuesday if I needed it.

There was more traffic on the way to downtown than I had imagined there would be at 5:30 a.m. The Birmingham economy is dominated by the medical industry and downtown is stuffed with hospitals and medical research buildings, so maybe it was all people who work in those places. I just know I was surprised. As we got to the hospital at 6 a.m., I sent one last brief email to someone and turned my phone off.

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