I’m embarrassingly blessed to be able to spend my days doing things I love: writing, making music, studying theology at Duke. But when you’re trying to balance life as a journalist, author, musician, student, landlord, husband and father, sometimes too many things need to happen all at once.

It was mid-November, and my responsibilities already had a head start on me because exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving one of my tenants reminded me I was two months behind in fixing a clogged showerhead. And then on Friday the band had a gig in Tennessee, which meant I lost much of the day to the interstate.

Then we had a big family birthday weekend in Asheville, and I had left the writing of a graduate school paper to Monday, the day it was due. Plus I owed contract materials to my book publisher but hadn’t looked them over yet. And I had another paper looming, one for which the professor had said the student could demonstrate “that they have read and understood the essential texts of the course” and still get an F. No pressure, though.

I was trying to catch up on more than 1,000 pages of reading for this paper when I got a call from Mom asking for help getting Nanny’s obituary into the Boston Globe. My maternal grandmother had passed in early October. Mom had moved her and Poppy here from Florida after they could no longer care for themselves. We’d had a service at their old-folks apartment complex in Carrboro, but most of our family couldn’t come. We’d decided to have a bigger funeral the day after Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, where Nanny had raised Mom and my aunts and uncles. Plus my aunt needed a good photo of Nanny for laminated prayer cards to hand out at the service. And I needed to choose and practice a couple of songs for the occasion.

All of this, of course, was really important stuff. Nanny gets a lot of the credit for what I think was a very happy childhood. At her house, I could count on apple-cinnamon oatmeal packets, chocolate pudding with the skin on top, and margarine melted on my spaghetti because I didn’t like tomato sauce.

When I was 5 years old, all I wanted for Christmas was Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing Fighter. Starting before Thanksgiving, every time I saw Nanny I would ply her for information, to assure myself she had bought the right one.

Finally, a couple of weeks before Christmas, she pulled the package from under the tree, peeled back the wrapping and showed me the toy, just to shut me up.

When I was baptized at 9 years old in a little country church, still dripping wet, Nanny and Mom held up towels in the back of the sanctuary so I could change into dry clothes. She also gave the best back massages. We’d sit on the couch in her little TV room and she’d scratch or rub my back for what seemed like an hour straight. So no matter what was going on in my life, I had to do whatever I could to honor this great woman.

But I was stressed out and feeling it. My neck and upper back were stiff; I’d been fighting a bad cold and hadn’t stretched or exercised in a few weeks. It so happened that the Thursday before Thanksgiving I had scheduled a visit with my friend Megan Jones. She’s a student at the Body Therapy Institute in Siler City, and she’s been giving free massages to friends in order to meet her certificate requirements.

As Megan went to work on my back, it’s hard to describe the feeling of peace that came over me. Between the soothing Eastern music, the release of knots in my muscles and the simple, quiet stillness of mind and body, I had the singular thought: Life is a gift, and I am loved. It was as though Megan’s hands were not just her own, but instruments of divine care.

Nannies are for little kids. Once you grow up, no one scratches your back or celebrates your birthday or makes you sweet treats like Nanny did when I was young. But, on the other hand, I have to be grateful that I could walk three-quarters of a mile from my house, stop on the campus of a world-class university to print some papers, and walk another three-quarters of a mile for free treatment by a masseuse-in-training. Just on Broad Street, I suspect there are more acupuncturists, chiropractors and massage therapists than other small cities have, period.

There is a long, complicated and sometimes painful story of how I came to be living in Durham. But I have found here a community of people who not only care for one another, but also have remarkable sets of skills that would be harder to find in Anytown, USA.

Sometimes what you need is a backrub, and the City of Medicine’s got healing hands.