When I first met Michelle, the first thing she did was hug me.
It all started when Michelle emailed me one morning and asked to interview me for the newspaper. I was floored. I met her at a coffee shop. I wore my most expensive T-shirt.
This was early in my fledgling career—if you can call it a career. I had never done an interview before.
At the time, I was living with my mother-in-law in a house that smelled like bath powder and Febreeze plug-ins. My wife and I resided in a bedroom the size of a casket and shared a restroom with my mother-in-law.
Trust me, no matter how rough your life is, it gets a little rougher when you share a bathroom with your mother-in-law.
Back then, I spent my days working on novels and columns, and I spent my evenings working late hours as a beer-joint musician. My wife served as a caregiver to her mother; my mother-in-law spent her weekdays listening to HGTV at volumes loud enough to liquify
Pittsburgh steel.
That was our life.
So I drove to Mobile one afternoon to meet Michelle for the interview. I was nervous. I showed up early. My hair was long, tied back in a ponytail. My beard looked unkempt.
Before entering the café, I glanced at my unsightly reflection in a window and cringed. I was wondering what Michelle’s reaction to me would be.
She hugged me. That was her reaction. She rose from her table and embraced me.
When the “Mobile Press-Register” later ran her article about my work, I read her words while seated in my mother-in-law’s living room, as Chip and Joanna Gaines blared on television loud enough to levitate furniture.
Nobody had ever written the kinds of things Michelle wrote about me. And probably never will again.
The next day I started getting calls from people in my life. People had seen…