Coming to My Senses in Canada

17 08 2026

It was the summer of 2026 when I finally let River go.

There was no ceremony to it, no last conversation in which everything was explained and the scales were somehow balanced. Life rarely gives us endings that clean. What remained instead was the knowledge that I had spent three years trying to understand someone who had hurt me, as though understanding the hurt might somehow make it hurt less. I kept looking for the explanation that would turn cruelty into confusion, indifference into damage, damage into something I could forgive.

For a long time, I told myself he might not know what he was doing. Perhaps his aloofness was an act, some private wound behind it. Perhaps he simply couldn’t see what his behavior did to another person. Was my compassion generous, or had it become a hiding place?

Eventually, there was only one fact left that I could no longer explain away: he didn’t care. That realization arrived quietly. I began to understand that my patience had become permission. Sometimes wisdom consists of knowing when the generous interpretation of another person has become an ungenerous interpretation of yourself.

I had people around me who understood this before I did: friends who had traveled their own versions of this road, coworkers who expected more of me than I was expecting of myself, and David, my husband, who had been right more often than I wanted to admit. They had watched me make accommodations for behavior I would have told anyone else never to tolerate. Sometimes hope is the enemy.

Now that I had ended it, I needed distance. Distance from River, certainly, but also from the version of myself that had remained standing at the same locked door, waiting for it to open. I rediscovered my best self in Canada.

Our trip to Vancouver did not begin auspiciously. The train was three hours late, and by the time David and I arrived it was after midnight. At the border came the familiar questions.

“Why are you coming to Canada?”

“Where are you staying?”

“How long will you be here?”

“How are you leaving?”

There was nothing particularly menacing in the questions, but there was a chill to the exchange, the bureaucratic suspicion of two tired men arriving after midnight with luggage and an explanation. Then I mentioned that David and I had come up from Portland for Pride. Something in the officer’s face changed.

“Enjoy your stay,” he said.

And we did.

Vancouver seemed to rise out of water and glass. Towers caught the shifting northern light while mountains stood beyond them, enormous and indifferent. The harbor moved constantly—freighters carrying the serious business of commerce, sailboats and yachts carrying the less serious business of pleasure. Everywhere there seemed to be green: forests climbing toward the mountains, parks opening unexpectedly inside the city, trees reflected in the blue-gray water.

Stanley Park sea wall

David and I settled into the rhythm that marriage often teaches you. Our differences became less something to overcome than something to use. I pushed him to walk farther than he wanted. He indulged my determination to dance late into the night in a cocktail lounge overlooking the harbor. We ate well, talked to strangers, bicycled through Stanley Park and watched a city celebrate Pride without appearing to apologize for its happiness.

Travel inevitably produces the question: “Could we live here?” Vancouver was a yes.

In some ways it resembled Portland: the mild wet climate, the devotion to green space, the proximity of water and mountains, the particular Pacific Northwest conviction that civilization and wilderness can coexist within sight of each other. But there was something else in Vancouver, something harder to photograph. There was a sense of joy.

I don’t mean that everyone in Vancouver was happy, but there was an ease in the streets, a sense that people expected something pleasurable might happen to them. After three years of allowing another person’s darkness to occupy too much space in my own life, I noticed that ease immediately, probably because I had begun to want it again.

We returned to Portland carrying our luggage and the residue of a good weekend — the pleasant exhaustion, the private memories, the feeling that life might be easier somewhere else. That feeling was confirmed before we even reached our front door.

The contrast was immediate. The despair I had grown accustomed to now felt heavier, as though something in the city had hardened. Vancouver had reminded me what it felt like to move through streets animated by pleasure and possibility. Back in Portland, the atmosphere felt different: frayed, angry, unpredictable. What happened next seemed to confirm everything I was feeling.

Outside our building, a young man was destroying the thin trees planted along the sidewalk. They were hardly grand trees, just skinny urban saplings held upright by stakes, the kind cities plant as small declarations of faith in the future. He was breaking them deliberately.

David told him to stop. The man turned.

He was much younger than David, larger, perhaps forty years his junior. For a second there was only that primitive calculation one makes when a stranger begins moving toward you and you realize the ordinary rules governing public life have disappeared.

Then he hit David in the face.

I dropped the luggage and reached for my phone. Before I could do much of anything, another man—a stranger, younger and fitter than either of us—came running. He chased the attacker away.

Then there was silence. David’s nose was bleeding, but it wasn’t broken. We stood there on the sidewalk beside our luggage and the damaged trees, taking inventory of what had happened. A few seconds earlier we had been travelers coming home from a weekend away. Now we were two men confronting the strange fact that violence can enter an ordinary afternoon without invitation.

Something else had happened, too. I wasn’t afraid.

Or perhaps that isn’t quite right. Fear was there, but it no longer had the authority I had been giving it. Standing beside David on that Portland sidewalk, I understood something I had failed to understand during those three years with River: being compassionate does not require being passive. Understanding another person’s suffering does not obligate you to become its casualty. There are moments when turning away is wisdom, and there are moments when refusing to turn away is wisdom too.

River had humbled me. I can admit that now. He forced me to see the limits of my own compassion and the danger of confusing endurance with strength. Canada reminded me of something equally important: the self I thought had been destroyed was not gone. It had simply been buried beneath all that forgiving and hoping.

I had spent enough time examining my failures. I knew where I had been weak. I knew where I had surrendered ground. I knew the difference now between compassion and capitulation.

The trees outside our building would have to be replaced. David’s nose would heal. Vancouver remained across the border, glittering in memory, while Portland was still our city, damaged and difficult and asking something of us. I picked up the luggage.

The age of reflection was over. The age of action had begun.

I had spent enough time examining my failures. I knew where I had been weak. I knew where I had surrendered ground. I knew the difference now between compassion and capitulation.


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Categories : Canada, David, Healing, Portland, Relationships, Travel

The Cost of Belonging

5 05 2026

Pressure washing train platforms in the daylight has become, for me, an exercise in force and patience, the body leaning into the resistance of a hose alive with heat and pressure, the water cutting through grease, grime, and the residue that settles where thousands of strangers pass through without a thought.

There is a rhythm to it, almost meditative, moving around benches and columns, tracing the edges of what accumulates in public spaces, stripping away what has hardened there overnight. Some mornings, standing in the spray and steam, it occurs to me that much of life is not so different — that adulthood, for all its grand ambitions, becomes less about building than maintaining, less about arrival than repair.

By day, I clean platforms. By night, a few evenings a week, I sit in classrooms studying electricity and industrial maintenance, learning the architecture of systems — how things hold together, where they fail, what it takes to bring them back to life. There is something unexpectedly satisfying in it, this practical education, this late return to the mechanics of repair. I made a B in electricity and moved on to industrial maintenance, and what surprises me most is not the difficulty but the familiarity, as though these skills were waiting somewhere beneath the surface all along, buried under years of other pursuits.

For years, my life ran on schedules, machinery, and the restless movement of trains — the strange nocturnal rhythm of graveyard shifts and stations that never really sleep. There was a kind of order in that world, harsh but reliable, the machinery of transit moving people toward destinations while I remained in motion myself, orbiting the lives of others. When I gave up that shift for daylight, it felt like a small reclamation, a return to ordinary time — dinners at reasonable hours, afternoon walks in the spring light, the possibility of living inside the rhythms most people take for granted.

Spring in the city has a way of making renewal feel possible. The light lingers longer in the evenings, trees begin their annual insistence on resurrection, and the air softens just enough to make you believe that change can be gentle. At this stage of life, that feeling carries its own seduction, because renewal is never as simple as the season suggests. It asks something of you — a letting go, perhaps, or the willingness to see clearly what once seemed promising.

It was during this season, in the midst of learning how to repair machines and reclaiming daylight, that a close friend invited me to dinner at a new private club in the city. I had heard of it, of course, one of those carefully designed spaces meant to gather the creative and connected, but I had never imagined myself there. That first evening, the place seemed alive with the easy vitality of belonging. The dining room glowed with conversation, small clusters of people leaning toward one another in laughter, their gestures loose with familiarity. Upstairs, the rooftop pool shimmered against the darkening sky, music drifting through warm air, the city opening below in all its glittering possibility.

It was not the luxury that struck me. It was the atmosphere, the sense — or the appearance — of connection. These days, friendship is no longer something you stumble into but something you work to sustain and that kind of atmosphere exerts its own pull.

I was surprised when they accepted my application. Places like that carry their own invisible codes, their own assumptions about who belongs. I have spent most of my life working, earning my place through labor rather than access, and stepping into that world felt, at first, like crossing into another version of life.

But first impressions have a way of collapsing under repetition.

What had seemed open began, over time, to reveal its boundaries. The friendships there had long been formed, their circles tightened by history and habit, and moving among them felt less like entering a community than brushing up against one. There were rules, too, some spoken, some not, and I learned them awkwardly, by breaking them — small mistakes met with correction, moments of embarrassment that reminded me how easily a person can feel out of step in a place built on social fluency.

None of it was dramatic, but it accumulated.

And slowly the illusion thinned.

What I had mistaken for community was, in many ways, the performance of it: the visible signs of connection without its deeper invitation. That recognition was disappointing, though clarifying. It reminded me that community cannot be manufactured by architecture or atmosphere, however persuasive the setting. The appearance of welcome is not the same thing as welcome itself, and the performance of connection is not connection. Real belonging remains mysterious that way. It forms slowly, often without announcement, through time, repetition, and the small, unremarkable acts by which people come to trust one another.

So I canceled the membership, not in anger but in recognition. Not because I had changed, but because the promise had revealed itself as something else.

There is a peculiar freedom in seeing through an illusion, even one you wanted badly to believe.

These days, what I want feels simpler, though perhaps it always was. Work that teaches me something. Friendships that unfold naturally. Time spent in sunlight. A body strong enough to carry me where I need to go. The quiet dignity of learning new things, even now.

Standing on those platforms in the wash of hot water and steam, watching the grime lift and run toward the drains, I think often about how much of life becomes this very act: not accumulation, but discernment. Not gathering more, but learning what can be released—washed away, let go of.


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Categories : Education, Friendship, Growth, Work

Winter, After the Silence

11 02 2026

It has been a while since I’ve written.

Not because nothing has happened. Quite the opposite. Life has been arriving in waves, and I have been standing in the surf without quite knowing how to describe the undertow.

Winter has hit harder this year.

In the early morning hours, walking home from the train station, I navigate mobs of crows clustered in the trees overhead. They cry out before they let loose, peppering the sidewalk with their droppings — a crude warning system. I walk carefully. There is something about the darkness at that hour, the industrial quiet broken only by wings and wind, that feels both ancient and immediate.

Crows Overhead

Along the way I pass people sleeping in doorways. Sometimes there are dogs curled beside them, wrapped in blankets, loyal in ways the rest of us struggle to be. The city breathes differently at that hour. Stripped down. No pretense. Just bodies trying to endure until daylight.

“You’re a very empathetic person,” my therapist friend once told me. “You give so much. Most people aren’t like that.”

I didn’t know what to say then. Empathy feels less like virtue and more like exposure. You feel everything. You absorb it. And lately, there has been a lot to absorb.

The people I looked up to most of my life are dying now. My father included. I have tried to memorialize them the best way I know how — in words — but grief does not move in tidy lines. It comes in waves. Regret rides in with it. Regrets, I’ve had a few. Some small. Some seismic.

The transit agency job keeps my writing afloat. I’m taking a college course in electricity, too. Dad would have liked that. There is something solid about learning how currents move, how power is transferred. It makes the invisible visible.

When I was disqualified from the rail operator position, the union stepped in and saved my job. That was the good news. The bad news was the overnight shift — outside, in winter — moving, coupling, and decoupling trains for the next day’s service.

The yard is all steel and breath and repetition. My fifty-year-old body has begun to protest. I sleep more. I battle colds and congestion. I’ve run out of sick time. With budget cuts looming, I pray for health the way some people pray for miracles. Just get me to spring. Let me sign up for a day shift. Let light return in some practical way.

David remains my rock. At his age, working forty hours a week in retail is no small thing. I wish he didn’t have to, but it keeps him moving. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Motion as survival. My step count has never been higher since taking the yard hostler role. A coworker told me, “I have no desire to be caged in that cab for ten hours a day.” I understood what he meant. Movement feels like proof of life.

Still, I miss the sun. I miss Florida’s warmth, even though there have been days colder there than here in the Pacific Northwest. It isn’t just temperature — it’s the rain. The gray. The way it seeps into the psyche. After eight years, I sometimes think I have battled depression to a draw. Not defeated it. Not surrendered. A stalemate.

I try not to get pulled into politics. I am a public servant. But the news some days is unbearable. The cruelty. The speed with which outrage ignites. Digital life has given us constant connection and constant combustion. It is hard not to look. Harder to look away.

I think often of the summers when I worked in the parks. The disconnection. The way nature set the pace. I fell in love in Yellowstone. It was, without exaggeration, the best summer of my life.

There are alternate versions of me that sometimes feel more vivid than the one I inhabit. The version who eloped to Italy with Ann. She loved me. It was true. I often wonder what that life would have been.

But there was a secret then. A stigmata I carried too long. It shaped my choices, narrowed my courage. Decades pass in the space of one unresolved truth. And just like that, the realization lands: I will never be a father. The sting comes sharp and sudden, like a Georgia yellowjacket on a hot afternoon. You don’t see it coming. You just feel the burn.

At my annual physical, I learned I have high blood pressure. Dad had it too. I ask myself why I cannot relax. Am I still trying to prove something? Am I restless because some part of me believes another life-altering opportunity has slipped by? Is this as good as it gets?

I flew to Alabama to see my mother and brother. I won’t write more about that. Empathy again — the instinct to protect, to soften edges, even when they cut me.

Tomorrow night, I will return to the train yard. The crows will still be there. The cold. The coupling and uncoupling of cars. The small prayers whispered into the fog.

My spirit is not broken. But it is bruised.

And I am hopeful — stubbornly, irrationally hopeful — that this static feeling will pass, that something in me is still recalibrating, that winter, like grief, like regret, like love withheld and love remembered, is not the whole story.

It is only a season.


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Categories : Birds, Dad, Exercise, The Train, Uncategorized, Yellowstone

In Memoriam

30 11 2025

There are days you know are coming, and yet when they arrive, they catch you unprepared, as if you had misunderstood the terms. I had just bought a plane ticket to Alabama, picturing an ordinary visit: my mother in her new kitchen, my father settled into the small routines of a life that had narrowed but not yet vanished.

Then came the message from my brother: ‘Urgent, please call.’

When I did, he was crying.

“Dad’s gone,” Keith said.
Two words, and everything after them felt strangely suspended, as though spoken from another room.

My father went to sleep on Thanksgiving and did not wake up. The do-not-resuscitate order held back the paramedics from trying to undo what his own body had already begun. In its way, it was a mercy.

He had dwindled to ninety pounds. “Nothing but skin and bones,” my brother kept repeating, as if naming the truth could soften it. A year of strokes, Parkinson’s, diabetes — an accumulation of slow undoings. He had long been unable to walk, living in the narrow corridor between decline and endurance.

My mother moved him from Florida to Alabama so Keith could be close enough to help. “This is not how I wanted to spend our golden years,” she would say on the phone. No answer made any of it less true.

From across the country, guilt was easy to reach for. Anger too. Anger that I didn’t get to say goodbye, didn’t get the hug, the last talk about camping trips, the golf clubs he gifted me or the way he taught me to tie a necktie. His final message came in 2021: Happy Thanksgiving, John. I love you too. After that, the words no longer held their shape. His mind couldn’t steady them.

Watching him fade, even from a distance, was its own kind of grief — this man who had built a dream house with his own ambition, who traveled the country to watch the Seminoles play, who climbed the corporate ladder in the way men of his generation believed they were required to. He came from the deep South, from a world where tenderness was rationed, where men learned early to keep their guard high and their feelings unspoken. Toughness wasn’t just a personality — it was cultural instruction.

It is impossible to understand him without understanding that.

He was hard on me growing up. Hard in ways that left marks — some visible, some not. The hole in the drywall stayed for months after one fight, a quiet reminder of what happened when tempers ran too hot. Maybe he believed he was preparing me for a world he thought would be even harder. Maybe he feared what he didn’t understand about me. Maybe he was reenacting the discipline he had survived.

He wasn’t a saint, though he belonged to the Knights of Columbus. But he was also not a villain. He provided everything he knew how to provide. He earned status, built a life from almost nothing, raised two sons, and gave generously to his community. And like many men of his time and place, he struggled with the more fragile currencies — encouragement, softness, apology. If he withheld love, it was because no one had taught him how to offer it.

His marriage to my mother was a 55-year journey with its battles; divorce hovered more than once. I hated the way he treated her near the end, but even then, she stayed. Some loyalties in the South are stitched early and hold long after they fray.

Mike & John, circa 2021.

When my aunt told me, “Your dad has never been an easy man,” there was an entire history folded inside those words—his upbringing, his hardships, the stoicism expected of Southern men, the unspoken wounds that harden into personality.

Dad didn’t want a memorial or service. It fits. Men like him didn’t believe in being publicly grieved. Instead, he asked that his ashes be scattered into the Apalachicola River, the water that first shaped him. A return to the beginning.

My last memory is from last summer: him smoking on the porch in the punishing Florida heat, the light hitting him in a way that made the pain visible. As I walked away, I glanced back. Our eyes met for a moment, and I knew — even then — that this might be the last time. And it was.

When he died, the surprise was not in the timing but in my own response: a brief indifference, followed by a deeper ache — for my brother and mother, who carried the weight of his long decline, and for the boy in me who had always wanted something gentler from him.

A part of me is gone with him. A part that learned discipline, work, and endurance. A part shaped by his silences as much as his words.

In the end, he deserved better. We all did.
But this was the life we shared, tangled and imperfect, marked by the culture that raised him and the quiet love he never could express.


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Categories : Dad, Family

The Dream Derailed

9 08 2025

It wasn’t the sirens. It wasn’t the alarms or the strobe of red light flaring against a sleeping city.

It wasn’t even the man collapsed on the floor of my train, lips slack, the color gone out of his skin like a tide receding. No, what undid me was the quiet afterward.

That winter night, I stopped the train at the platform as protocol required, keyed out, radio in hand and made my way to the trailing car. I found the man unconscious, his companion kneeling beside him in frantic disbelief. The evidence — needles, foil, the sour chemical reek — was all there, as it always is.

I followed the instructions we all know by heart: check for breath, check for pulse, check for signs of life. He had one. Just barely.

This wasn’t new. This was becoming ritual. I had imagined trains as vessels of order, of precision — steel-bound promises running on time. Instead, I found myself driving a shelter. A triage center. A dim, clattering corridor of last resort.

Back at the break room, I told the others. “Probably just wanted a warm place to pass out,” a colleague said without looking up. And he wasn’t wrong.

This is what it had become: a moving refuge for the discarded. Those too sick, too high, too cold, too far gone. They boarded without fare and without malice, most of them. And we — the drivers, the operators, the ones who still believed in timetables and track switches and clean fluorescent platforms — we bore the brunt.

Alarms blared at random intervals. The emergency stop cord yanked not out of panic, but curiosity or confusion, sometimes spite or to simply be recognized by a world that had passed them by. Delays cascaded like dominoes. And always, I returned to the cab a little more frayed, a little more unmoored.

So yes, the irony was sharp, almost comical. When I was called into the manager’s office and told I was being let go — for failing to run on schedule — I almost laughed. Not out of disrespect, but recognition.

How does one maintain a schedule when the job requires you to stop, literally and figuratively, to deal with overdoses, breakdowns, psychic collapse? How do you keep to time when you’re forced to become both conductor and caretaker, when the cost of returning to the rail is a few stolen minutes to breathe, to collect yourself, to remember what part of the city you’re even in?

Those minutes, those necessary silences, were not inefficiency. They were recovery. They were sanity. And they were, in the end, my undoing.

“Egress there, sir,” the security guard said as I walked out of the yard that once held my dream.

A dream not crushed, but dismantled piece by piece, like an old train car scrapped for metal. A dream damaged, yes. But not dead. Just waiting, maybe, for a different track.

Safety First


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Categories : Homeless, Humility, Oregon, The Train

The Dream That Carried Me

18 07 2025

When I was a boy in the Florida Panhandle — where the heat made any breeze that cut through the pine trees feel like a gift from heaven — I used to press my ear to the railroad tracks and wait.

For what, I wasn’t sure. A rumble. A tremor. A sound that confirmed something was coming. Trains moved through our coastal town, carrying paper from the mill. They moved like ghosts, urgent and unbothered, and I wanted, more than anything, to be the one driving them.

That was the dream: steel, speed, the illusion of control.

And now here I am, fifty-two years old, riding in a single-car light rail train into Hillsboro, Oregon, cloaked in the dark hush of a December morning. I am the one pulling into an empty platform, the one with hands on the lever. My left brings her into braking. My right taps the bell. The train stops clean.

“You don’t need to have a death grip,” Jorge tells me. “Be gentle with her.”

We were halfway through our training program and on the overnight shift. There are nine of us left, split into three teams. Jorge, all Cuban warmth and exacting calm. James, slower, quieter — Los Angeles cool, but alert beneath it. They don’t teach you how to handle the machine as much as they teach you how to be with it.

“Relax, take your time,” Jorge advised. “Do each step individually and it’ll all tie together and become natural.”

Sage advice. Slow your roll, essentially.

Before the yard-to-yard test — the one that moves you from theory to real track — I got sick. A stomach virus that left me wrecked and sweating through nights I couldn’t remember. I missed one day. James let me make it up. Another trainer might not have. I passed. Just barely. I passed.

“Watch your intermediates,” James told me as we walked through the Beaverton yard.

Signals, I learned, are prophecy. Intermediates tell you what’s coming — when to slow down, when to stop. Ignore one and anything can go sideways. Signals, switches, speed. There is no room for sentimentality out here. Only precision.

Oregon’s light rail system is complicated. Beautiful, yes. Ingenious, even. But also dangerous. Tracks run through intersections, weave alongside bike paths, share spaces with cars, pedestrians, skateboarders, scooters and dogs on leashes. You are constantly negotiating with chaos.

After the test, we entered line training. Three weeks of shadowing operators who knew too much, but said very little. They spoke in glances, in warnings you felt more than heard. This was no longer the dream. This was the reality.

You learn quickly: revenue service is where romance goes to die. Where you stop seeing yourself in the story and start seeing everyone else — angry passengers, lost time, bullying supervisors and the thousand ways things fall apart.

Still the horn cuts through a sleeping city, something stirs in me. That boy on the tracks, listening for the future. He never imagined what the job would cost. But he’d still want it.

So do I.


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Categories : Florida, Growth, The Train

Purpose & Alignment

20 06 2025

I left Japan with confidence and purpose.

Keita had been an excellent host and travel partner. Our shared interest in history, arts and logistics was a good match.

As we said our goodbyes at the airport, for some reason, it felt like I would be back someday. There is still so much of the country to see, including Mount Fuji, which was shrouded in clouds on the day we traveled to Fuji Kawaguchiko for a hike.

Mt. Fuji hiding in the clouds

“Take care of yourself,” he said, before giving me a long hug, its squeeze a sign of the tight bond we had developed through the years.

Our embrace was a rare demonstration of public affection from this quiet and reserved man. There were no performative bows as we departed, just a respectful energy exchange. Equal parts love and admiration.

I slept most of the flight to Hawaii. With a three hour layover in Honolulu, I found a seat at a crowded bar and sipped on a crisp IPA, while scanning through backlogged emails on my phone.

Above the beer taps, cable television networks broadcast the latest developments from the presidential campaign. It was all but over at this point. A disastrous debate performance had felled President Biden. Trump 2.0 was on the way.

Even Keita was sold on the strongman schtick.

“Trump will keep you safe,” he told me one night over soba noodles in a trendy Tokyo restaurant.

Turning away from the news, I found an email from my recruiter about the train conductor program. From a pool of nearly 900 applicants, my number was one of 50 chosen. I felt lucky indeed.

The program would run for 12 weeks, from late November to early February. Several hurdles needed to be cleared to begin training.

A cognitive test, which included basic math, reading and writing was first followed by a panel interview with questions like: ‘Think of a difficult situation you experienced and how did you solve it?’

Then came the physical tests, making sure you could get in and out of the train, throw a switch and raise the pantograph (the part of the train that connects to the overhead wire) on your own. After that it was on to the classroom, where I joined a group of external hires just out of CDL training.

This would be my new family for the next three months and I couldn’t have asked for a more down to earth and kind hearted group. No more insensitive comments from immature assholes trying to one up each other on the toxic masculinity scale.

In my new setting, we applauded each other’s wins, sent encouraging text messages and genuinely wanted to see each other succeed.

That’s what made this group special. I could let my guard down and not have to worry about someone looking for a weakness to exploit.

Because of my previous experience in maintenance as a shop helper, I had a leg up on the early weeks as we learned about reading switches and the geography of the yards. Out on the mainline is where the big challenge would come as we were introduced to signals and system maps — known as the ‘alignment’ in work lingo.

“The alignment always wins,” one of my line trainers told me. “It’s like a casino. The house always wins.”

“But, why are we competing with the alignment in the first place?,” I asked.

Silent for a couple of seconds, the trainer shook his head and sighed.

“You’re not, John. That’s the point.”


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Categories : Confidence, Friendship, Japan

In Hot Water

29 05 2025

What left an impression on me about Japan was its culture of cleanliness and respect, qualities that were ever apparent as we traveled the country.

Admittedly, there was a sense of embarrassment for my homeland. Japan’s trains and stations were clean, riders were considerate of fellow passengers and there was nary a whiff of smoke — much less illegal drugs in the air.

Most of the platforms had vending and recycling machines, which would be impossible to maintain in a vandal plagued Portland.

To my surprise, some train cars were designated for women only. I found this a bit odd, considering the country’s reputation for male chauvinism.

Keita’s mother, on the other hand, was not one to be subjugated. An octogenarian who was still driving — a stick shift car no less — she fetched us from the train station and always made sure we ate a big breakfast each morning.

After a long bus ride from Tokyo we arrived in Kusatsu, where you are greeted instantly by the rotten eggs smell of sulfur from the hot springs.

In the town square sits the Yubatake, a field of water, where people gather particularly at night to socialize. Some believe the minerals from the hot springs have healing properties. If true, I was more than ready for a soak.

“Let’s do the Onsen after we check in,” Keita said to me as we hiked through the narrow and curved streets up to our hotel.

Donning our yukatas (robes), we entered the male side of the Onsen. Inside, phones and cameras are strictly forbidden and it is custom to bathe naked. To set the mood, relaxing zen music played overhead as I stepped into the tile enclosed pool.

Life takes unexpected twists and turns and here I was, the lone Western figure at a remote hot springs resort tucked away in the mountains of Japan’s Gunma prefecture.

And the water was wickedly hot!

It’s heat pulsing as I stood knee deep and naked in the Onsen’s large pool. The convection like an attack on my nervous system.

While the temperature stymied me, others were easily submerged in the mineral waters.

“John, are you okay?,” Keita politely asked, noticing my hesitation to take a deeper plunge.

“Yeah, it’s just very hot,” I replied, thinking there was no way I could go any further.

Then I heard what sounded like a frog noise beside me. I turned to see an older man, sitting in the pool, with no expression on his face. Then suddenly, that sound again:

“Ribbet, Ribbet.”

I smiled at him, but knowing very little Japanese, did not speak. Keita engaged the man in friendly banter, translating for me.

“He says you’ll get used to the temperature,” Keita told me. “And he thought you were French.”

The metaphor could not have been more fitting.

After that exchange we waded away from the man and I did eventually work up the courage to go completely under. This being the first step in my transformation. I was washed and exposed and felt no shame.

I slept good that night. The Onsen brought my Misogi challenge more into focus. I was determined to become a train conductor and upon returning home would enroll in a program to begin this process, leaving behind mundane janitorial duties.

Yes, this frog had escaped the boiling water.

Ribbet, Ribbet.

John & Keita at the Yubatake in Kusatsu, Japan


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Categories : Friendship, Growth, Japan, Travel, Water

My Misogi Challenge

4 05 2025

In Japan they have a concept that is designed to create profound personal growth through very difficult situations.

Undertaking a challenge like this will likely result in failure, but the higher purpose is for the process to test your limits and ultimately change you for the better.

This concept is called the Misogi Challenge and is rooted in a traditional water cleansing of the mind, body and spirit. Before accepting my assignment, I traveled to Japan to visit an old friend, whom I had not seen in nearly 15 years.

Keita and I met in New York City. It was the summer of 2009, when I naively tried to move to the Big Apple with just a few bucks in my pocket and big dreams floating around in my head.

Keita offered to help — giving me a place to sleep for a few nights. That’s when I first learned that mattresses are not a necessity in Japanese culture.

Keita did return the visit to Florida, flying into our brand new airport in Panama City Beach. He took a real shine to me and I was flattered by such exotic attention.

We kept in touch over the years, thanks in large part to Facebook. When the pandemic hit, Keita returned to Japan to live with his mother, a recent widow. There wasn’t much a classically trained violinist could do at that time.

For me, traveling to Japan was also a test to see if I still had the bravery to venture out of my comfort zone and explore unknown territory. I was also aware that I would need to demonstrate diplomatic skills as to not come off as an ugly American.

After a long flight from Portland, with a layover in Hawaii, our Airbus A330 landed safely at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. There was a long line for customs as Japan was one of the last countries to reopen post-COVID and had quickly become a popular travel destination.

Once cleared, I entered the landside area and there was Keita waiting for me. He was easy to spot in the crowd, eagerly anticipating my arrival. As I approached, an expression of relief washed over his face.

“John, welcome to Japan,” he said, with a quick bow of his head while enthusiastically reaching to assist with my luggage.

Keita had aged well. He was lean and fit, a few inches shorter than me with slightly more gray hair. We took the train to his hometown of Hamura, where arrangements had been made for me to stay in a hotel. In the morning, we would depart for the mountain resort town of Kusatsu.

That night as I laid in bed, in a room the size of a luxury closet, I thought about how fortunate I was to be here — and how far I’d come professionally. When I first met Keita, I was a destroyed man in survival mode, aimlessly wandering the New York streets, foolishly thinking charisma and the ability to write would propel me to success.

As hard as that stage of my life was, the adversity helped shape me into the stoic, can do person I am today. It toughened me up for harder times in South Florida and the Pacific Northwest.

I was prepared for my Misogi challenge. The next day would come the water.

 


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Can Do

20 01 2025

One word convinced me. Actually, it was the concept behind the word.

That concept took me to another level — snapping me out of a cautious funk of settling for the easy way out or crumbs along the path of least resistance.

The word is CAN.

It first came to my attention through a sticker on the back of my cousin’s jeep. Come to find out a Hawaiian man, battling depression, decided to defeat the doubt and negativity in his life by changing his mindset.

CAN defeats Can’t. Simple as that, right?

Well, it’s not as easy as it sounds. As those who have accepted a challenge can attest, half the struggle is just getting started.

I have been fortunate enough to accomplish certain things in life that seemed impossible as a youngster. The list of achievements include running for public office, hiking the Grand Canyon, publishing a book, covering a presidential election and getting married.

Some would say that’s a life well lived.

But I know there is more to experience. Who wants to be mopping trains forever? Not this guy. Could I operate them? You bet, I can.

There was also a not so subtle desire to start a family. This is something Stanley picked up on in our therapy sessions, particularly when it came to my attachment to River.

“You want to be needed,” he said.

Who doesn’t, I thought.

David still needs me and we had a lovely time in Hawaii. The hospitality Rob & Shelley extended to us was above and beyond.

It’s amazing how fast the time goes. I still vividly recall summers on St. George Island and Apalachicola with Rob and all my other cousins. I now realize how precious those moments were.

Looking back, was there anything that could have altered my path? Would a different decision at a critical juncture turned out for the better?

Second-guessing now seems silly.

Changes did await on the mainland. A new work assignment, on the other side of town, would free me from the graveyard shift, challenge my thinking and provide the opportunity to put my new ‘CAN DO’ attitude on display.

For the first time in years, checking on my folks in Florida seemed both doable and desirable. My father’s health continued to deteriorate and mom’s cries for relief were like a broken record.

An old friend from Japan was also on my mind. Like many of the international friendships forged during my younger days traveling, promises of reunions now seemed possible.

CAN was already at work in me.

Fear no longer had a grip on my emotions. Failure, I had come to realize, was just part of the process — not the end result.

I was ready to enter the arena again. To dare greatly while speaking my truth softly. To strive valiantly without coming off overconfident and cocky.

I think I CAN. I think I CAN. Choo-Choo!

All Aboard!


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Categories : Confidence, Family, Hawaii, Optimism

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