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his heart always felt funny. Like a jigsaw puzzle with about two-thirds of the pieces missing. When I met Maggie, I realized what he was talking about. Most guys talk about their wives’ figures, and yes, mine has one, but it was her Audrey Hepburn hair and Bette Davis eyes that stopped me.
    After two or three more “accidental” hardware meetings, I got my nerve up and asked her out, and it didn’t take long. If I had had any guts, I would have proposed after two weeks, but I needed six months to work up the courage. I bought a golden band, we married, and somewhere on the beach at Jekyll Island beneath the stars, she persuaded me to finish my degree.
    I enrolled and started night school at the South Carolina satellite campus in Walterboro. If Nanny and Papa’s deaths had taken the wind out of my sails, then Maggie helped me hoist anchor, raise the sails, and steady the rudder.
    For most of my life, and thanks in large part to Nanny’s prodding, the only thing I was any good at was writing. When I enrolled as a freshman at the University of South Carolina, I registered in the English program and started down the track toward a creative writing degree. It’s what I was good at, or so I thought.
    During my first three years of college, I wrote some stories and sent them off to all the magazines you’re supposed to send stuff to if you’re a writer. The Saturday Evening Post. The New Yorker . I’ve still got a folder of all my rejections. Once my folder got pretty full, I quit sending my stories.
    But Maggie continued to believe in me. One day while I was finishing my senior year at the satellite, she printed a few of my pieces and sent them to Virginia along with an application for graduate school. For some reason, they accepted me into their master’s program and even said they’d pay for my classes and books. I don’t know if that’s because I wrote well or because I couldn’t afford it, but either way, they paid for it.
    So Maggie and I charted a new course, and I returned to school. It was not long after, though, that my grand illusions of plumbing the deeper meanings in storytelling, fired by Nanny’s love of reading, were shattered. Graduate school was no lighthouse. If it weren’t for Victor Graves, a gnarly old professor who laughed like a rum-drunk sailor, I’d have never made it. Vic took me under his wing and helped me navigate.
    After I wrote my thesis, Vic encouraged me to apply to the doctoral program. With little hope but no other direction, I did. Three weeks later I received my acceptance letter, which Maggie framed and hung above my desk. I couldn’t believe it. Me? A doctoral student? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m the guy who didn’t study in high school. But the letter said they wanted me, and once again they said they’d pay for it—which was nice, because without the financial backing, I wasn’t going. They gave me a fellowship, and I got to work.
    Thanks to Vic, light bulbs began clicking on like a Fourth of July celebration, and it was there that I really discovered just how smart Nanny really was.
    It wasn’t easy, but we made it. We lived in an upstairs, one-room apartment, and while Maggie waited tables, I worked the morning preload at UPS. I woke early and she worked late, so for about two years, we didn’t see each other much.
    Despite Vic’s best encouragement, I quickly found that my grandmother had forgotten more stories than most experts would read in a lifetime. And not only did she understand them better, but she had a knack at helping others do the same. Just because you know something, or think you do, doesn’t mean you can teach it.
    Beneath the sly, academic façade, and hidden behind their glossy degrees, most of my teachers were just frustrated hacks who couldn’t write a great story if their lives depended on it. Out of the void of their own missing talent, they