(Updated: June 12, 2026)
Note: The following is a cautionary tale involving a job search, an interview, deeply thinking about the past (or overthinking it) and painful memories that surface subconsciously whenever the time is right for understanding and re-affirming one or more of the lessons life teaches, or several of them.
It occurred to me just this afternoon, with more clarity than ever after re-reading this essay, and while updating it, that I knew deep down when I was making a fateful, final attempt to land my absolute dream job, which I describe below, that the door had closed permanently two years earlier on my teaching and journalism careers. Call it karma. The moral order of the universe. The suffering that precedes wisdom.
This door shut, whether I realized it or not, after suffering the consequences of making the worst job decision of my life — to take, out of sheer desperation — a junior college teaching job in literally, to me, the absolute middle of nowhere, and one for which I was totally unprepared. It was all dreadfully wrong in every sense. People were depending on me — students, teachers, administrators. But I failed them and myself. But quitting that teaching job when it had hardly begun was an act of self-preservation. Who knows what would have happened to me if I had tried to stay. Sometime in life we don’t know what else to do. We can’t fight, we find ourselves rapidly spiraling downward, and we flee. Fight or flight.
I was in a small college town 400 miles from my hometown, and surely I could walk into class the first day and do what the job required. Not even close.
The full story of that huge life-job-career-dependent fiasco/tragedy, (for it was quite a traumatic summer of 1989), is one I will never share in detail because it would be unbearable to write about as such. What I am expressing here in this prefatory note is as close to any form of closure I’ll presumably ever attain for that brief time of mental and emotional upheaval, that almost complete breakdown.
And so the cautionary tale that follows, and the ruminations that precede it, can now serve as that form of closure I have sought. The guilt has to go. The feeling at the time of being a complete failure at life persisted for years, but then life turned around for me after a final battle with serious depression.
I’ve been unemployed at times for more than a year, and it was agonizing. I desperately needed the teaching job at that junior college, and when that completely went up in smoke, I still somehow clung to the illusion that teaching remained in my future. My core inner strengths tenuously sustained me in this resolve. And my previous teaching experiences in the early to mid 1980s had been deeply satisfying. Given the tight teaching job, setting, circumstances and state of mind, I could continue with teaching as a career. Or so I thought.
Hence, I ended up pinning false hopes on an ill-fated job interview for a teaching job in Oregon which in my mind anyway, distilled all my past teaching experiences and journalistic endeavors, including graduate school, into one job and place that would be my Utopia, my nirvana.
Oh how foolish we mortals be, even as hope continually springs eternal.
The cautionary tale:
I’m in a no-man’s land state of mind tonight. A bit numb. Peaceful, but sort of lost and indifferent to everything just now. It’s 3:30 am. I’m thinking about a lot of things. For instance, the way time marches on more and more steadily and quickly with each passing day, week, month, and year that I get older. I mean this literally.
It’s been nine years since I retired from my job. When I turned 75 this past April, I started noticing and experiencing more clearly than ever the effects of aging and the slow advance of diminished strength and mental acuity that can lead to the types of infirmity in advanced age that most of us fear, the most awful being Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia. Horribly and unthinkably, this disease robs us of our memories and our sense of who we are — our very selves, and I saw it close up for years as my mother descended slowly down the path of dementia.
What troubles age inflicts on these mortal clay vessels we inhabit, tough and resilient as they are! I remember when my aunt had a bad fall and subsequent hospitalization many years ago when sheas 90. I was very close to her. She had always been like a second mother to me. The experience shocked me and brought me ever closer to the presence of sickness, injury, the helplessness of being in hospitals, and an unwilling confrontation with the fact that life has to end. I was 51 at the time.
And because of this, I have to remind myself constantly that I only have each day that is given to me. I can do what I want for that day. How will my day matter? What will give it meaning and purpose? I fill my days with a multitude of intellectual and artistic pursuits. But it’s an extremely solitary life. I reach out to many via the Internet, but never in person. Without the Internet I think I might be a lost soul. So don’t say too many bad things about it, including AI. These are all lifelines to me.
But during any given day, thoughts can intrude about upcoming doctor appointments, cancer screening tests, blood work to get done at the lab, the endless awful news on the Internet, where to go to get out of me solitary abode, even if just for an hour. Fortunately, I live in a city where many options are available instantly. None of these concerns are, or even should be a blip on the radar for young people. I know. I used to be one of them.
However, even with all the dire bad news today, life goes on everywhere around me. The throbbing, churning, activity-obsessed world we’re part of, heedless of time, is busy consuming it in big restless, agitated gulps. No place for the aged, sick and infirm on busy, traffic-filled, streaming urban arteries that carry us along to our destinations. Busy, busy. Places to go. Things to do. Planes to catch. Products to buy. Work to do. One thing after another to stave off the void.
We look askance at elderly drivers poking along in this madness, turning off the highway with glacial indifference to the speeding cars heading their way in the other lane, avoiding destruction, just barely. Life goes on. We are time capsules shooting through space.
One consequence of my staying up very late each night is that the world has temporarily shut down, and all the thinking and pondering I do becomes, if not more purposeful, at least more meaningful. I begin to feel alone in the universe as I look out at the night sky from my fourth floor balcony.
But this feeling of aloneness is what enables me to block out out all the distractions of daytime so that my mind can escape temporarily the bonds of pure physicality, and dream, think deeply, and practice my own unique form of meditation, which no one has to teach me. I think a little bit about what I might do tomorrow, but unless I have an appointment to be somewhere, there’s no need to do anything.
So here’s what all this thinking can produce, even if unconsciously, or not going down any particular path. The results can send not only surprising, but magical. Nature heals and Nature sustains. That is one of the greatest lessons life has taught me, and you’ll see why.
One night when I came in, whatever peace of mind I had attained that day, whatever anchors of self-confidence and goodwill toward myself held my little craft of ego securely in place, were instantly jarred from their moorings because, for some reason that seemed fateful and purposeful, I started thinking about really bad job searches and interviews I’ve had in the past, one in particular 34 years ago.
When you’re young, unless you get lucky and find the perfect job and career, it seems like a lot of your time is spent either thinking about a new job and better life, actively looking for a new job, or applying or interviewing, if you get lucky.
Until I settled down in my final job and career when I was 44, I had suffered through a lot of job searches and interviews, a number of them quite unpleasant, inexplicably, since generally I did very well in interviews. But thankfully, job hunting is something I’ll never have to do again. However, that thought is never enough to free myself from pointedly painful memories, much less the certainty that they will surface again no matter what.
So, when I suddenly and disconcertingly began thinking about that bad experience from decades ago, I remember looking at a framed photograph on the wall directly in front of me. I took it in northwest Oregon during the trip back from what turned out to be a miserably dehumanizing job interview in 1992.
It’s a picture of a quiet stream flowing imperceptibly over large and small rocks and boulders through a forest of red alders and firs. The alders are the understory trees and arch over the stream in a most beautiful way.
But, as with all photographs, there is usually more than meets the eye, for me anyway, within the compositions of the photographs I take.
Cameras have always been my second set of eyes, and pictures I’ve taken over the decades for my own personal, artistic reasons, as well as in many of my long-ago newspaper jobs, have connected me time and again with my past, and deepened my understanding of myself, and what I value and hold in esteem more than almost anything else has.
In other words, the process of seeing the pictures in my mind’s eye first, and then in the viewfinder, has been indispensable to the way I see and think about the world around me. What photographs tell me are stories that provide a way for me to remember incidents, places, people and things, for good or ill, but they often unexpectedly help redeem or soften the memories of bad experiences.
Thus that particular photograph taken in Oregon, which I alluded to earlier, has quite an interesting and significant story behind it, more so than most. It’s very special to me. I have it in my living room today, a framed 8x10 in. Print, produced from a strip of film negatives from that time. Though somewhat faded and dingy from time, I’ve digitized the photo and tweaked it a bit, preserving most of the original tone and mood (see below). I relate here that story of the photograph and why it’s so special.
It was July 1992 and I was living in Washington State, north of Seattle. Vestiges of youth still spirited my outlook. I was prepared to cast my fate to the Oregon winds off the Columbia River Gorge, one of my favorite places, and take a journalism teaching job at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, if it was offered.
When I got a call to come down for an interview, I naively assumed that I was among a select few candidates for the job, maybe three finalists, because of the distance involved in the drive to the interview site at the community college. I had my master’s degree in journalism, (my thesis was on community college journalism education); I had taught college level journalism at a large university, and I had served as editor of a couple of weekly newspapers. I thought I had a pretty good chance at the job. I was asked to prepare a brief teaching lesson on that bane of journalism instructors, the “inverted pyramid,”which basically is how to structure the opening paragraph of a news or feature story, sometimes simply called “the lead.” Teaching the concept effectively is not as simple as it might seem, I discovered from actual experience.
I had prepared what I thought was a good lesson. I really liked the college and could almost imagine what it would be like living in Salem where it was located. Yes, I could indeed see myself there. And best of all, I didn’t need a Ph.D to teach there. Now, with all the benefits of hindsight and decades that have passed, I realize it was all a delusion. But that’s another story.
The day of the presentation when I would meet the faculty and students late in the afternoon, was a beautiful day. I visited some waterfalls nearby and walked around the lovely campus of another local college there in Salem.
Finally, I got to the community college and went in for my presentation. Mine was obviously the last one for the day, the committee was weary, and they didn’t seem the least bit interested in me. Basically, I learned I was part of a cattle-call, not a serious interview. I was given a perfunctory tour afterwards of the journalism classrooms and the office area and sent on my way. “We’ll let you know,” I was told as I was leaving.
I had no idea it would be anything like this. It would be difficult to describe the sinking feeling I had immediately afterward. I was certain I had made the four-hour drive for nothing. I had been treated like just one of perhaps a dozen applicants for the job who came to give presentations, and then I left with hardly a thank you or a pleasant word from the man who conducted the interview and tour.
I was feeling quite dejected and disillusioned by that point because I realized I’d been had once again. Do you think there was any mention of reimbursing me for my night at the motel, or my gas or mileage, or meal expenses? No. Nothing.
The next day I left to head back home, but I was determined to turn my loss into something positive. I decided to explore along some back roads in the far northwest corner of Oregon and then cross over the mouth of the Columbia River and head back to Seattle
About an hour and a half later, I found myself on a winding and nearly deserted road that wound along the Nehalem River . Maples covered the road in a winding canopy, and the trees were so dense that the sunlight above was obscured. But there was a fine and subtle light, just right for taking pictures. The sunlight in the woodland setting was evenly disbursed and there was no glaring contrast between dark green vegetation and bright sunlight.
After I had left in the Nehalem River at one point, I turned off the road and down a rutted lane to a small and unexpected sanctuary.
Since it was late summer, the rivers and streams I passed were barely flowing over the rocks and boulders. To my delight I saw a little stream, faintly trickling along in between the alder trees above it. I snapped a vertical format picture with a large boulder in the foreground and the S-curve of the stream flowing down into the center of the composition I was framing.
Again, the current in the creek was imperceptible, but just enough to scatter some light to the center of the stream’s surface. It was muted light, coming through an opening in the trees. I took several photographs, got back in my car after walking around awhile savoring the peace and quiet, and was soon on my way again.
Many times afterwards I’ve looked at that particular scene in one of the photographs I took, reminding me of Nature’s harmony and order as the little stream slowly made its way toward the Nehalem River and then to the Pacific. I had an enlargement made of that photograph of the sanctuary, the discovery of which made the whole pointless and discouraging job-seeking trip worthwhile in the end. I also learned some important lessons about human nature.
And, while the callousness and indifference of the people at the college hurt, it was largely salvaged and redeemed by the experience of a drive along that peaceful, alder-shaded creek.
Now here’s the best and most tantalizingly mysterious part of that photograph. A very curious and remarkable thing occurred while I was looking at it one night years ago, perched on my bedroom wall right in front of me where I sat at my computer for hours on end. What occurred was all quite magical and surreal, strangely compelling and fascinating. I kept staring at the scene, so sharp and clear, and looking deep into the grove of alders and I noticed how, as if I had never seen it this way before, the two-dimensional scene was inexplicably transformed into a three-dimensional one.
I could hardly believe my eyes, but I could see into that picture as if it was totally lifelike and real. I felt as if I could have walked right into the scene and listened to the birds and flowing water just as I had when I stood at that spot composing the photograph. The experience only lasted a few minutes, but I never forgot the sensations I had then. I was startled and happy.
I hadn’t been imbibing any reality-altering substance — never do — but my mind and senses were definitely attuned to something special for me to enjoy. It was strangely exciting and gloriously intoxicating for someone so seemingly grounded in ordinary reality as myself.
The next morning I looked at the photograph again, and it was its normal, two-dimensional self, a beautiful picture, for sure, and one I never tire of looking at, but the magic was gone, for now at least, and until I once again can journey back in time, into that magical woodland sanctuary.
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