I stood six feet two inches tall and weighed just under three hundred pounds.
My head was completely bald.
My beard was thick, gray, and long enough to rest against the top of my chest.
Both arms were covered in tattoos collected over decades, some beautiful, some poorly planned, and several I wished I'd thought about for another five minutes before getting.
My left knee had been replaced.
My right shoulder was held together by surgical repairs and stubbornness.
And my black leather vest was covered with patches belonging to the Iron Mile Riders, a motorcycle club based outside Little Rock, Arkansas.
People often judged me before I spoke.
Parents pulled children closer.
Store employees watched my hands.
Security guards sometimes followed me through aisles.
And strangers occasionally crossed parking lots rather than walk past me.
I'd stopped taking it personally years earlier.
Most people saw the beard, leather, tattoos, and motorcycle.
They decided the rest.
Funny thing was, I'd done the same thing to others more times than I cared to admit.
That was one of the hardest lessons Nora Bennett would eventually teach me.
But before I tell you about Nora, I need to explain what brought me to that Walmart.
Because I wasn't supposed to be there.
Not really.
I'd spent the previous evening visiting a friend named Travis, a sixty-four-year-old motorcycle mechanic recovering from knee surgery.
He lived outside Little Rock in a little house filled with engine parts, old photographs, and enough motorcycle magazines to build a second house out of paper.
Travis was one of those men who believed asking for help was a personal failure.
When his knee surgery left him temporarily unable to move around the house comfortably, he insisted he was doing fine.
Then he called me and asked whether I could bring an alternator for a motorcycle he had been rebuilding.
I told him he didn't need an alternator.
He needed to stay on the couch.
He told me the couch didn't have a motorcycle engine.
We argued for ten minutes.
Then I loaded the part onto my Road King and rode down to see him.
I spent the evening helping with a few things around the house.
I took out the trash.
Picked up prescriptions he'd already arranged with the pharmacy.
Brought him dinner.
And listened to him complain about how his physical therapist was apparently trying to ruin his life.
By ten that night, he was exhausted.
He offered me his recliner.
I should have refused.
The chair looked comfortable until I tried sleeping in it.
Sometime around three in the morning, I woke convinced somebody had replaced my spine with a railroad track.