Dateline: Kumamoto, Japan. Fall of 1998.

I am living in a small apartment near downtown, tatami under my feet, a low loft overhead, the city moving quietly outside. I’d been teaching English conversation long enough to know I was going nowhere in that job. It wasn’t a crisis; it was a slow stalling-out. Good enough money, students I liked, but no real future. A life you could idle in forever.

Most nights I sat on the floor with a notebook, paging through information on American graduate programs. I wasn’t dreaming about tenure, an academic ladder, or a nameplate on some elite office door. I wasn’t trying to become a history professor at all. What I wanted was simpler and sharper: a way back to the U.S., a life I could actually live inside, and a path that might let the woman I loved come over later, maybe as a nurse, once her father’s condition — only after marriage — was met.

I emailed Tom Wilson, my old Asian History professor from Hamilton, and asked if he would write on my behalf. He agreed, and somewhere out in the system his recommendation went off to people who would never meet him. He also wrote back: don’t go to Northern Arizona; go to Chicago, my school. You can become a professor. It was kind and sincere and completely beside the point. He was thinking career. I was thinking oxygen.

The search itself was slow. I compared cities, programs, costs, climates. When I landed on Northern Arizona University and started looking at Flagstaff, it just felt right: high desert, pine trees, a small city you could walk, not a sprawl you endured. The history program was solid enough, and it wasn’t a teaching-credential track. It looked like a place where I could move forward, not just sideways.

When the offer came back, it was more than just admission. NAU gave me a scholarship and in-state tuition, even though I had never lived in Arizona. That got my attention. Schools don’t hand out cheaper rates to out-of-staters for fun. For whatever mix of reasons — Japan, Hamilton, Tom Wilson’s letter, my file on someone’s desk — they wanted me. That was enough.

I packed up my life in Kumamoto, said goodbye to Washington — my second English conversation school, not the state — and flew back to Spokane. From there I bought a red Toyota pickup for four thousand dollars from a teacher’s husband at St. George’s; he was a cop. It was almost all the money I had. I drove away with a truck, an acceptance, and not much else.

The road south was long and winter-empty. I followed a paper map through states I barely knew, slept in a couple of cheap motels under thin blankets, and kept going at first light. The truck held together. I did too.

Early January, I rolled into Flagstaff. Cold air, bright sky, nothing arranged. I had no housing lined up and almost no cash. I parked on campus, put on black trousers, a black turtleneck, and a black blazer, and walked straight into the History building like that was a normal thing to do.

Karen Powers, the chair, treated it as if it was. I told her I’d just arrived and had nowhere to stay. She didn’t flinch. A friend of hers, she said, had a room to rent a minute from campus, three minutes from the department. We walked over.

It was a small back bedroom, six hundred a month, a parking space in the yard, and a shared bathroom with the guy in the next room. No kitchen, no run of the house. Not ideal. But it was available, and it was there.

I took it on the spot. That same day, I moved in.