David McElroy

When I first saw Beth Wednesday, she looked like a woman who had just won the lottery. She was grinning from ear to ear and looked as though she might start bouncing off of walls at any moment.

“I passed! I passed! I made it!” she told me, as though she assumed I knew what that meant.

I was in an office on a college campus and Beth had just come out of a computer lab where she had checked her final grades for the semester. She had passed all of her finals and she had excellent grades. She had successfully completed her first semester of nursing school.

She explained all this to me and told me that she was so excited that she had to tell someone — and I was the first random stranger she saw. It made me happy to see her so jubilant, so I asked her to step in and tell me more.

Beth is about 40. On this day, she seemed on top of the world. But she kept telling me that she had been afraid she would “blow it.” I kidded her about whether she has a history of negative self-talk.

“Have you been talking to my therapist?” she asked jokingly. “Seriously, that’s what she’s always telling me, that I’m always expecting the worst and saying bad things to myself, but that’s the way it’s felt since my husband left in the middle of the semester.”

All of a sudden, this happy story sounded much more interesting to me — and more complicated.

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I have very few pictures from my past. I save few mementos, at least not in an organized fashion. I have boxes of junk that I’ve pulled out of desk drawers when I’ve moved in the past, but only because I haven’t gotten around to discarding the 99 percent of it that’s junk.

When I talk to others about their past, they frequently pull out photo albums or scrapbooks. I have very little like that to show. If you want to travel through my past, my bookshelves are the place to start.

I spent an hour Monday night idly looking through my books. I wasn’t looking for something to read. I wasn’t even opening them. But spending time looking through books I haven’t read in years — just touching them and reading the titles — is a bit like time travel. Even if I never read a book again, it seems to carry a bit of me in it — whatever I was like when I experienced the book the first time.

This German history book takes me back to when I was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Alabama. I was taking a class covering the development of modern Germany starting in the 19th century and looking at how Hitler eventually came to power. Each Monday afternoon, I spent three hours listening to Dr. David McElroy lecture in a dry but informative voice on the third floor of ten Hoor Hall. (We shared more than our names. Oddly, Dr. McElroy and I also drove identical cars.)

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If you missed my  appearance Saturday on local talk radio in Fairbanks, Alaska, I now have links to the archive of the broadcast. The first hour is here and the second hour is here. Both files are MP3s, so they’re suitable for listening to in your browser or downloading to save for posterity.

Hosts Josh Bennett and Steve Floyd were gracious enough to keep me around for both hours, and we had a very wide-ranging and laid-back conversation about why the coercive state is a bad idea. We also touched on issues related to what those of us who oppose the state should be doing in the meantime. (Spoiler: My answer is that we have to simply get ourselves prepared and wait for the right opportunity when it comes along. I wish I had a magic bullet.)

I just got around to listening to the entire thing Monday afternoon and it reminds me that I need to do more of this for practice. I can hear times when my mental gears are grinding and I’m thinking, “What in the world did I intend to say when I started this answer 15 seconds ago?”

Overall, it was a lot of fun for me. It’s long, but if you’re interested, please take a listen.