Where it all began.

I’m Dr. Michael Craig. When I was a young teenager, I was re-introduced to a man who would shape the rest of my life, and I didn’t even realize it at the time.

His name was Jack Stiles. He was a Black friend of my father’s who was hired to install an electrical outlet in our home for a window air conditioner. I was asked to help because Jack was paraplegic and pulled himself around the floor while I handed him tools, wires, plugs, and connectors. He told me we’d actually met when I was too young to remember him, and he called me “Bubba,” an affectionate name shared in the Black community near the marshes outside Savannah, Georgia.

Jack also had a way of listening that I’ve never encountered in anyone else, before or since. While I often rambled on, he would stop what he was doing and listen to me and ask questions as if I were a famous person or a genius. This got to me, so after that day, I was naturally drawn to visit his home on a regular basis. He often would be in his bed, surrounded by books and a few keepsakes from his college days. He was well educated, and built his home by himself many years before he was, in his own words, “stricken” with polio. His stories were fascinating, but he also asked me a lot of questions about what I was doing. “I want to learn,” he said.

Jack was a widower and lived alone, but his family was on the premises nearby, brought him food, and helped with daily chores. I often helped with a few chores myself in exchange for being able to pour out all my teenage angst, and imaginary “wisdom.” I shared with him every drama a young man could possibly have: heartbreaks, ambitions, fears, and half-baked ideas about who I wanted to become. Jack never once argued, judged, or tried to fix me. He mostly just looked at me, then looked away as if trying to absorb my words. He listened fully. Patiently. As if my concerns actually mattered.

“Most people don’t need to be fixed. They need to be heard.”

Since I could never talk openly with my father, Jack became my substitute father. He even said my dad would sometimes call him up to ask what was going on with me, but Jack reportedly just told him I was okay, and not to worry.

That kind of attention changes a person. It taught me, long before I ever started on the road to healing, that most people don’t need to be fixed. They need to be heard. In the coming years, I moved away from Savannah to pursue college, travel, and a chiropractic education, but never forgot my dear friend. I would call often, just to share my experiences, and ask how he was doing.

In January of 2004, when Jack turned 90 years old, I decided to drive from Atlanta to Savannah before dawn to bring him breakfast and celebrate his new year. We mostly just talked, laughed, and discussed philosophy, meditation, history, Ray Charles, and the state of worldly affairs, then I’d make the long trip back home. This soon became an annual tradition for me. Every January I made that same drive, and we spent the day talking, mostly about stuff that evoked memories, happiness and an inner sense that time was standing still.

“Bubba, I’ve got no urgencies,” he would often tell me. His mind remained sharp and his awareness ran deep. In 2008, my wife Soma and I saw Jack for the last time. He passed away quietly after that, at the age of 94. In the years since, while I no longer make that trip to Savannah, the memory of those earlier visits, and of a man at peace with himself, never left me.