Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist in Cleveland and author of "...and His Lovely Wife."

LeBron isn’t the only one who's returning. Last fall, my husband and I left our house in the suburbs and moved to Cleveland.

We live in the largest residential development built in the city since World War II. It is a haven of new construction nestled in a zip code that saw one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. You don’t have to drive far from our neighborhood’s entrance before you’re dodging potholes and witnessing continued blight.


This is where I belong, in this city with fresh hopes and monumental challenges—not least of which, perhaps, is that it might be the most misunderstood and underestimated city in America.

Greater Cleveland is divided, geographically and ideologically, by the Cuyahoga River. I’ve lived on both sides of it. I raised my children, mostly as a single mother, in diverse neighborhoods on the near east side. After I married Sherrod Brown in 2004, we moved into his then-congressional district—he’s a U.S. senator today—in a virtually all-white neighborhood on the far west side.

It was not a good fit. Not because people weren’t nice. It was the sameness that ate at me. For the first time in my adult life, I was driving on the freeway to and from work to end up surrounded by people who looked just like me. Instead of the usual street-to-street crawl enveloped by the sounds of the city, I was driving 65 miles an hour with windows up and a view of big-box stores by the exits.

I felt exiled, and increasingly left out, watching from afar as the Cleveland that had launched my journalism career dared to reimagine itself into this current renaissance. I’m in the thick of it now. I left a front yard the size of a ballpark for one that takes six steps to walk from the porch to the sidewalk. The head of Cleveland’s Urban League lives on one side of us. A daycare worker and a forklift operator live on the other side. It is impossible not to know pretty much everyone in the neighborhood because people so often stop to say hello.

A month after we moved in, on an unseasonably warm Halloween night, our friend, Sue Klein, showed up with Vietnamese takeout from Superior Pho and—a coup in Cleveland—the season’s first batch of Christmas Ale. We lugged out baskets full of candy and welcomed nearly 400 trick-or-treaters, which was about 350 more than we typically got in the suburbs.

We had the time of our lives meeting the children and their parents, grandparents and older siblings. A number of them said they were surprised to see us, and welcomed us to Cleveland. Most came by car from nearby neighborhoods, and it struck me later that, unlike my experience living in suburbs on both sides of town, none of the neighbors complained the next day about all those outsiders.

To me, this is what it means to live in Cleveland, united in our differences, Midwestern to our core. We don’t have the luxury of uppity exclusion, cherry-picking who belongs. Diversity is the leveler.

Every city has its stories, and Cleveland’s is more complicated than some outside reporters’ short-form fiction. I want to say that we’re more than our problems, but you’ll hear that from residents in any city. More accurately, perhaps, is to say that it takes time to get to know us, and we are worth the effort.

As I was reminded just last week, Cleveland is best understood through conversation.

Two days after the Republican National Committee delivered its jolt of good news to Cleveland, I was talking politics with a cab driver named Jeff.

Jeff had picked me up at home for a scheduled trip to the airport. He had the face of a man who has worked hard all of his life. He insisted on carrying my suitcase from the porch to the car, and waved me off when I apologized for missing two of his four calls to my cell phone in the previous hour. “I just wanted you to know I would be on time,” he said. “I didn’t want you worrying about missing your flight.”

He asked where I was headed.

“Washington,” I said.

We weren’t out of my neighborhood before we engaged in Cleveland’s favorite pastime, after sports. We earn our battleground reputation, one political argument—no, let’s call it a spirited discussion—at a time.

I asked Jeff if he and his fellow cabbies were excited about the uptick in fares bound to accompany those 30,000 Republicans coming to town in 2016 for their national convention.

He shook his head. “I don’t really know anything about it yet, so I can’t say I’m excited. And you should know I’m not affiliated with either party. I’m what you call one of those Tea Partiers.”

He paused, looked at me in his rearview mirror and sensed the invitation to continue.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “There’s not one good thing about Obama.”

Here we go, I thought. Another white, working-class guy who’s angry with the government.

It’s a trigger for me, I’ll admit, because of my roots. I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood near Cleveland, surrounded by hard-working men who looked a lot like Jeff, including my father. Same weathered face and big hands, same no-nonsense assumption of responsibility. Everyone was united as much for who they hated—money-hungry corporations—as for who they championed, which was always one another.

Like many families, we had a Jack-and-Jesus wall. Portraits of Jesus and John F. Kennedy hung side by side, their partnership reflecting the two religions in our house. Mom took a job as a nurse’s aide when she was 38 and sang in the church choir. She trusted Christ to guide her life. Dad worked in maintenance for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company and was a proud member of the Utility Workers of America, Local 270. He was glad for mom’s prayers, but he put his faith in the Democrats.

After covering Cleveland as a reporter and columnist for 30 years, I know firsthand how much times have changed. With few exceptions, you can’t assume anymore that you know a person’s politics based on occupation or neighborhood. People are more complicated, more confounding.

I also know that, because Cleveland is so diverse, you can find someone here to say just about anything. Racism, sexism and just plain stupidity are as common here as they are anywhere else. Makes the living easy for journalists who want to swoop in for quick quotes to confirm the pre-conceived narratives spooling in their heads.

Here’s what else I know, and I’m tired of fellow Clevelanders calling it our best-kept secret: We are decent, hard-working people, and we care about one another. A lot. This city is full of people who live paycheck to paycheck, but you would never know it by their generosity.

When I became a columnist for the Plain Dealer in 2002, one of my earliest lessons about the heart of Cleveland came after I wrote about a coat check’s tip jar at a popular party center. Unbeknownst to the customers dropping dollar bills in that jar, management was keeping the tips. You could almost hear the collective gasp on the morning the column ran. My voicemail, which held 90 messages, filled as fast as I could delete them. Local radio station WGAR fielded calls on it all morning. Out of more than a thousand emails by noon, only two readers sided with management.

That tip-jar policy changed overnight, which inspired many Clevelanders to be in touch about other injustices.

Customers and servers wanted me to know how often restaurants’ mandatory gratuities for larger parties never went to the men and women waiting on tables. They identified managers who forced servers to pay the tabs of bolting customers. They named restaurants that deducted service charges from tips left with charge cards.

I wrote more than a dozen columns about tipping practices. No matter where I travel in the United States, I still ask servers if they get to keep their whole tip if customers use a charge card. Most of the time, they look stunned by the question. Only in Cleveland—a decade after I wrote those columns—do servers so often say, “I get asked that a lot.”

That’s not about me. That’s about good people with long memories and a stubborn sense of fairness. I just thought I’d let you know in case you were planning a trip here—and I suspect a lot more people will be doing that in the years to come.

I also encourage journalists who will be covering Cleveland to hop on a plane and come visit –soon, and often. The best way to learn this town is to talk to someone other than the civic boosters and tireless critics. Both of those groups are important, but they don’t tell the whole story of this city.

For that, you have to talk to people who are not used to being asked for their opinions. Many of them wear nametags and make their living welcoming strangers at restaurants, hotels and all those fancy museums you hear about. They see it all, and while they put up with their share of bad behavior, they love this city and have had it with the negative coverage.

I was reminded of this in the middle of writing this essay, when I had to go downtown for an event at the newly remodeled Westin Hotel. The first person to greet me was Greg Blount, who had worked for more than 30 years as Greg Anthony in Cleveland radio and TV.

Now, he’s the Bell Captain at the Westin.

Spare him your pity.

“I had a pretty good run in broadcasting, but a lot of us lost our jobs in the mid-1990s, so it never felt personal,” he said in his still-silky voice. “And look what’s happening here. Look at this building, this city. So much is happening here. Cleveland is an honest town. You know exactly who you’re dealing with when you’re here.”

As we were talking, doorman Dennis Radford walked up and wanted me to know that Blount is “the best bell captain you’ll ever meet. He’s been around the world, but he’d rather be right here in Cleveland.” Radford then leaned in and mentioned that he tossed a football with RNC chairman Reince Priebus during his visit to scope out Cleveland for the convention.

“I told him they’d be back,” Radford said, laughing. “And wasn’t I right.”

Which brings us back to LeBron James.

Look, I’m a Clevelander. I’ve mentioned that, right? Of course I was obsessed with his decision.

“Make it, already,” I shouted numerous times to no one who was listening.

Last Friday, shortly before noon, I was sitting on a plane refreshing Twitter every few seconds, hoping we wouldn’t take off before the news broke. Shortly after 12, I read Sports Illustrated’s tweet and turned to my husband.

“He’s coming home,” I said over the roar of the engines.

I’m not embarrassed to admit I teared up. So complicated, these feelings for LeBron.

Like virtually all Cleveland columnists, I’ve written about him in the past. First I defended him, urging critics to lay off when they insisted he should marry the mother of his children. He has always been an involved father, and I’m for families in all their configurations.

I defended him again when it was clear he was thinking of leaving.“I’d hate for Cleveland to lose him, but we can’t hinge our happiness on the career of a man who’s entitled to his youthful ambitions,” I wrote at the time.

So much for that. I was furious when he left the way he did, announcing it on national television from Connecticut— Connecticut, for God’s sake—and I hated how the national media depicted us as a town of Eeyores.

By the way, to this day I’ve yet to find evidence of the reportedly hundreds—or was it thousands?—of angry Cavs fans who burned their LeBron jerseys. With a few jackasses and a YouTube video, you, too, can create an urban legend.

Blame the mother in me, but in 2011 I was back to defending LeBron after he failed to win that oh-so-important championship ring.You don’t know hate mail until you make excuses for LeBron James when Cleveland is stuck in the second stage of grief.

All is forgiven. No kidding. LeBron is coming home, and he missed us, too. We are beside ourselves in celebrating his good judgment.

Most of us, anyway. Some did find our single day of unfettered joy to be alarming, and disappointing. The basic theme of their grievance: Look at you morons, caring more about an overpaid basketball player than (name any current world crisis). Some of these people are my friends, and I know they had to get this out of their system. Sometimes we just can’t enjoy the sunshine, and we wish all those happy people would just shut up.

We will always have our naysayers, and thank God for that. We’re never going to get full of ourselves, nosireeno.

Back to that cab driver named Jeff.

Had I decided that his Tea Party confession was all I needed to know about him, I would have looked down at my smart phone and our discussion would have ended there. I know this because when I pulled out my phone to check the time, he immediately asked, “Do you need me to stop talking?” So Cleveland.

I assured him I did not, and over the next 20 minutes here’s what else I learned about Jeff:

We were born in the same year, and he didn’t mind being teased for beating me to 57. “So far, so good,” he told me. “I think you’ll like it.”

Virtually everyone he cares about disagrees with his politics, including his friends and family. “Especially my wife,” he said. “I married a black woman. She and her whole family love Obama.”

When I asked if he thought it was that simple, he shook his head. His wife has a chronic medical condition, and he is grateful for a health-care provision that saves them $2,000 a year on a crucial prescription drug.

“You know, you never stop worrying about the woman you love,” he said, “but this has given me some peace of mind.” He looked over his shoulder and nodded. “I’ve got health care now, too. You know, since Obamacare.”

He checked my expression in his rear-view mirror and chuckled. “OK, maybe there are some things to like about Obama. I don’t hate the guy. I’m just so sick of what’s happening in Washington.”

I will pass on the opportunity to mention how annoyed I am with fellow journalists in Washington who recently trash-talked my town.

Like LeBron, you’re family.

In Cleveland, family forgives.