About Us

Prologue

This section is really for visitors to the site who don't know us, as most of the information here is stuff our family and friends already know about us. But, there might be a few nuggets you didn't know. This section also contain some info on our family trees, photos of family and friends far and near, and a few details about our hobbies (what few we have time for now). So read on – unless you really don't want to hear about how Michelle and John met and carried on a torrid, scandalous romance and eventually ended up in Chicago. (Hey, it is a fascinating story!)

For a little background on John, read his bio. If you want to learn more about Michelle, well, you'll have to wait until she writes her bio. Sorry.

Click on the links at the bottom of the page to go back and forth through each section. John now picks up the story:

Background, or "It's A Long Way to Tiperary"

I arrived in Japan about four months prior to Michelle in the spring of 1989 to work for two years as an English teacher at a Christian community center in the northern city of Morioka. If you've never heard of Morioka, well neither had I, and neither has anyone who isn't a professional skier. Morioka is in the Tohoku region of Japan in the northern part of Honshu, and is situated next to a volcano, Mt. Iwate, and some truly beautiful national forests, and has some of the best skiing in Japan. Even though Morioka's population is a quarter million, it is considered bush country by people in the "heart" of Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto areas). Basically, Morioka is to Tokyo what Billings, Montana is to New York. Personally, i loved the Morioka area, especially the skiing and the hot-sping spas.

Anyway, i arrived in Japan able to speak no more than a dozen words of Japanese and with only stereotypical notions about what the country and its people were really like. Needless to say, i spent the first three months in Japan just trying to figure the place out and having a good ol' time dealing with culture shock. Morioka has very little in common with Tokyo, and that includes Tokyo's cosmopolitan atmosphere. There were maybe 40-50 gaijin (foreigners) in the entire city when i arrived, and i managed to meet a lot of them in my first months there – many of us were in our early- or mid-20's, and we all hung out at the same watering holes, by which i mean the ones that allowed foreigners in, which were few and far between. Getting to know the Japanese was also a bit hard because (a) they are fairly reticent people, in general (although they do open up eventually, when you earn their trust) and (b) i couldn't speak Japanese. So, i didn't make very many Japanese friends.

I managed to maintain my sanity those first few months by hanging out with a small battery of fellow English teachers, sharing work and culture-shock tales at the local bar-&-grills and traveling together on weekends all over the area. I think i now understand (somewhat) the type of bond that soldiers make during wartime – in the sense that everyone is in unfamiliar territory, stressed out, with little means of support – because some of us made that type of tight bond in a very short period of time together. Because of our circumstances, we definitely shared a comraderie that i am sure never would have occurred otherwise. We still exchange holiday cards with some of them, like old war buddies, and one friend – who is still living there! – is honestly like a brother to me. I have very fond memories of those times together as a group.

Anyway, life in northern Japan was a challenge for a 20-something guy from the American Midwest not used to cooking or eating mainly rice and fish, the staples of the Japanese diet. There were only a few North American fast-food places, as well, where we could retreat occasionally for comfort food, and even fewer Western goods to be found. That's why when i stumbled on a Western food section in one of the two major department stores in town, i thought i had stumbled on a veritable gold mine. Why am i even mentioning this? Well, it was in that store, buying an Old El Paso taco dinner kit, that i first met my wife, Michelle.

Olé Tacos!

Michelle had arrived in mid-July to begin her two-year stint as an English teacher in a very rural town about 45 minutes north of Morioka. But this was her third stint in Japan, having lived there as an elementary school student at the U.S. Air Force base in Misawa and then as a college student on a semester abroad program two years earlier. So, before she was required to begin her teaching job (such as it was), she decided to spend some time with her host family from her semester abroad program who lived in Morioka.

As i mentioned, our paths first crossed at the end of July in the basement of this department store, where we were both shopping for some American food to break the monotony of our rice-and-fish diets. To make a long story less long, here's how well that first meeting went: Michelle couldn't run away from me fast enough. Really.

Actually it's not as bad as it sounds. I had approached her because i didn't recognize her – and i knew all the gaijin in town – and struck up a conversation because, well, she was a babe. Michelle had thought i must be somebody from her college, Earlham, whom she thought she obviously should have recognized but didn't. (I wore my hair quite long back then – almost hippy-length – which apparently means i would've fit in at Earlham.) So, she quickly made her purchase while i lingered happily in the Western food aisles, and next time i saw her, she was literally almost running from the checkout line to go up and out of the store, away from me. I didn't even get her phone number...

The first time we really met, though – i.e., when she didn't run away – was at my office about two weeks later. Through a strange coincidence, it turned out that my boss, Dick Lammers, and Michelle's father had been seminary classmates together, and once Michelle's father discovered this, he encouraged her to come to our center to meet my boss and say "hello" from him. So one day she stopped by and, while she was there, happened to notice on my wall a poster of the town where my parents lived, Saugatuck. This was an even odder coincidence because, as she proceeded to tell me, her parents had a summer cottage there. To understand how shocking this was, you need to understand that Saugatuck was then a town of around 1,500 people – maybe about double that in the summer. Even more shocking, we learned that my parents' home and Michelle's family cottage were just a few miles down the same road from each other. But we had never met. (Besides, i hadn't grown up in Saugatuck but in the Grand Rapids area.) Instead, we had travelled to the opposite side of the globe to meet at this center in the northern hinterlands of Japan.

Naturally, once our respective sets of parents got wind of this news, they got together to scope each other out and share a laugh about what serendipity our meeting was, and wouldn't it be great if our kids became friends?, etc. Only problem was, neither Michelle nor i were very interested in getting involved. It wasn't until six weeks later that we even got together again at my center and decided to make a "date", which was really a pretty casual affair: i invited her over to have tacos for dinner (guess why?) and then go out together with my gaijin friends. A taco dinner for a first date? I mean, you know how messy tacos can get, right? Not exactly a prime way to make a good first impression. So, obviously, we weren't really making a big deal of this.

There and Back Again

And, equally obviously, our first date soon turned into quite a big deal. We had to get over some pretty major obstacles, though, during our courtship in Japan: first, we lived 45 minutes apart, so we could only see each other on Wednesday evenings and Sundays (my two days off), and even then somewhat covertly (after all, i was a "missionary"). Second, once our story reached my grandparents, my grandmother was so emotionally overcome that she concluded that this relationship must have been ordained by God. –OK, reality check time: let's see, we were both in our mid-20s – Michelle was fresh out of college, in fact, and didn't want a serious relationship, and I was coming out of an emotionally-wrenching relationship – and neither of us had any idea what we were going to do once our respective two-year stints were up, yet we were supposed to keep dating with the expectation that God had ordained this to be a lifelong relationship? Oh, sure! No problem! Not much pressure there at all. Nah...

Somehow, though, that's what ended up happening. (I guess we must have some pretty strong-willed guardian angels.) We got engaged right before we left Japan together to go travel though SE Asia – which you can read about in the travelog – got married the next summer, honeymooned and then headed straight off to grad school at Indiana University.

IU was not an easy grad school choice for us because neither of us really relished the idea of living in Indiana. IU was a very good school for our respective programs, TESOL for me and East Asian Studies for Michelle, but we had also been accepted into other more prestigious schools for our respective programs. The only problem was that they weren't anywhere near each other: i had been accepted at Columbia Teacher's College in NY and Boston University, and Michelle had gotten into Stanford and the University of Washington. So, grad school really represented the first major compromise of our married life. But IU turned out to be a very good experience for both of us: we both enjoyed our grad school experiences and met some wonderful people, and Bloomington is a great campus, surrounded by some beautiful countryside.

Two years and two Masters degrees later, we headed right back to Japan, where i had landed a job as a TESOL professor at a private university in Nishinomiya, a suburb of Kobe, a large port city just west of Osaka. The job and the city were awesome, and the pay was great – far better than i could have hoped to make in the States for years; i felt like we had almost won the lottery.

A few months after we had arrived in Kobe, our situation got even better: Michelle – who was going stir crazy by then being at home alone – landed a job as the Assistant Administrator at the expat community center through another bit of serendipity. We visited the center, which was named CHIC, one day because we wanted to find out what it was all about, and chatted with the director of the center for about half an hour. We left the center and were shopping in a grocery store on the bottom floor of the building in which the center was housed when the Administrator came literally running after us and asked Michelle on the spot if she would be interested in becoming the Assistant Admin. Michelle and i could hardly believe our luck. It was an ideal position for her, and with my teaching job being an excellent fit for me, as well, everything was going well for us as 1995 started. We even decided to start paving the way for children by getting a cat from a local animal shelter.

The Big One

Then came the morning of January 17th. I had gotten to bed really late the night before trying to complete lesson plans for that day, Tuesday, and slept fitfully. At 5:45, I was woken up by an incredibly loud roar. 'An earthquake?' i thought, as i sat up to get my bearings. (Three weeks before, we had been visiting Michelle's host family in Morioka when there had been a category 4 earthquake, the first one i'd ever experienced, which had shaken me up a little, so i was still jittery from that. But Kobe was renowned in Japan for being earthquake-free: there hadn't been a severe quake in Kobe for 500 years.) No sooner had that thought run through my head when a giant wave – for lack of a better word – rolled under our building, throwing us up nearly a foot off the floor where we were sleeping. That jolted Michelle awake (duh), and we spent the next 15-20 seconds frozen in terror as the quake subsequently rocked our apartment back and forth several FEET in each direction.

If you have never experienced a really strong earthquake, there is no way to describe the complete loss of perspective you feel during one. All dimensions meld into one, because every familiar point of reference for your senses – such as a solid floor and solid walls – is gone, which makes an earthquake even worse if it is dark outside (which it was during this one). There is nothing to do but ride it out. Imagine being in zero G space and having someone blindfold you and spin you around in every conceivable direction for 20 seconds. That's about what it was like. This quake measured 7.2 on the Richter scale but, more accurately, a Category 7 (the most severe) on the Japanese scale. In fact, it was the first Category 7 quake to occur in Japan.

After the earthquake was over, our first response was, naturally, to get the hell out, only to discover that we were trapped in our apartment: the quake had cracked the walls around our door, expanding them so that the door was jammed shut. We were eventually freed by a neighbor who unscrewed the bars on our window and helped us get out that way. Once we were sure all our neighbors were OK, we ran around for a couple of hours searching for an operational long-distance public phone so we could call home to say we were OK. We finally found one near the university and i managed to get through to my brother who, like the rest of the U.S. at the time, was oblivious to what had just happened. After that, we went down to the apartment building where my other colleagues lived and noticed a large number of houses that were heavily damaged, tilting 15º or more off center, and others that had collapsed. That was when it started to dawn on us that this was a pretty major catastrophe. From some other colleagues, we were soon able to learn that much of Kobe had been devastated and parts of it were now on fire, burning out of control, and – worse – rescue crews were slow in coming and were having difficulty even getting into the city because the infrastructure was so heavily damaged.

Quake Aftermath

Anyway, at that point, there was nothing for us to do but go back to our apartment and wait for help. We spent the rest of the morning of the quake cleaning up the mess that had been our apartment and surveying how we were going to make do with no utilities and no water. So, we banded together with one of my colleagues and his wife and spent the next week simply trying to survive. (It gave us a whole new perspective on the plight of the homeless, that's for sure.) Fortunately, the quake had not damaged our apartment complex irreparably, and our building was declared safe to occupy. So, after the first night, when we huddled together under tables at my colleague's apartment riding out the frequent and severe aftershocks, we stayed at our apartment where, miraculously, our electricity was restored that same day (we were the only area in the entire suburb that had power).

Since we had electricity, we were able to watch the worldwide TV coverage of the disaster (what else could we do?), which was made all the more surreal by the fact that we could walk out our door and down the hill and see exactly what was being beamed around the world: the avalanche that buried dozens of homes and the people in them; the collapsed sections of the elevated expressway and bullet-train tracks; hundreds of collapsed homes and damaged office buildings; and the smoke from the fires burning out of control in Kobe. Being part of a natural disaster is one thing, but then seeing it on TV and then realizing that it's your neighborhood on TV is a real mind-bender.

The response of the university where i worked to the quake was, at first, to try and gaman – the Japanese equivalent for "just deal with it" – keep the school open and try to finish out the semester schedule, which had only two weeks remaining. However, when it became apparent that the damage to the area was so severe that it would take months just to get the city infrastructure back up and running again, the university cancelled the rest of the semester and graciously allowed the foreign teachers (us) to make arrangements to fly home and take a leave of absence – with pay no less! – until the end of March.

Leaving Kobe for our flight back home, though, had to be the most surreal experience i've ever had in my life. It took a monumental effort to get us and our luggage from our apartment to the lone functioning rail station in the entire Kobe-Nishinomiya area, which was only 3 miles from where we lived. On the train were hundreds of other scraggly, stressed-out quake refugees like us. Riding the train through Nishinomiya toward Osaka we saw dozens more collapsed buildings and other disaster scenes. But by the time we got to downtown Osaka, a scant 12 miles away, we were in another world: there were no signs of any damage, no emergency teams, no disaster – just a whole bunch of people going about their normal business and shopping, as if nothing had ever happened. I had no idea earthquakes could be so localized, like tornadoes. Very, very weird...

Life in Kobe

So, we returned to the States and spent the next ten weeks as transients, living with our parents again, but were able to take advantage of the enforced idleness to tell our quake story to some area schools and go visit various friends and family scattered across the country. We returned to Japan on April 1st to relative normalcy but a very different sense of life in Kobe. Over 6,000 people had been killed in the quake and its aftermath, and tens of thousands had been left homeless. Anyone seeing the damage in downtown Kobe, though, had to realize that had the quake happened a few hours later, during rush hour, the quake would have easily killed many more times that number. I have to admit that we felt a little survivor's guilt, especially since we were able to leave Kobe and didn't have to deal with living for weeks or months having no running water or gas and no public transportation. Even three months later, everywhere you looked in the city were reminders of the devastation: collapsed houses and buildings, razed lots, and construction crews, everywhere construction crews slowly rebuilding the city.

One positive post-quake development was that Michelle became the de facto head of the expat center, CHIC, where she had been working: her boss' house had collapsed in the quake, nearly killing her, and that was impetus enough for her boss to take leave of Japan permanently. So, Michelle started in her new role as soon as we returned and enjoyed a highly successful run as Administrator for the remaining time we were in Kobe.

In the meantime, my two-year contract at Kwansei Gakuin University was extended to a third year, which enabled us to become more involved in the Kobe community, which we loved – earthquakes notwithstanding. We were able to see more of Japan and travel to Australia, and through the international church, Kobe Union, i helped lead several Habitat for Humanity workcamps in the Philippines – you can see photos of these adventures, as well, in the travelog. In general, life was very good.

But as the saying goes, "All good things..." My teaching contract at KGU was non-renewable, and rather than have me try and find another teaching job in the Kobe area, we both decided that it was time for us to move back to the U.S. to be closer to our families again. We'd been living overseas a long time, and eventually global nomads like us have to decide whether they are going to live the expat life abroad or try to reintegrate themselves back into American society. We chose the latter, though with some reluctancy.

Familiar Landscape, New Roads

So, we left in the summer of 1997 and moved to Valparaiso, Indiana, where i had gotten a job teaching ESL at Valparaiso University. This was, in itself, a surprising twist of fate for us because when we moved back to the States, we both swore that we would willingly live almost anywhere in the Midwest, but in Indiana only as a last resort. To understand why, you need to have lived in small-town Indiana, as Michelle did for college and we both did for grad school (although Bloomington was and is a cultural oasis). Valpo turned out to be a decent enough community, but we had our sights set on living in Chicago. Later that fall, part of the Chicago equation fell into place when Michelle landed a job at an international cross-cultural training center there. Unfortunately, that also started her on what can only be described as a horrendous commute from Valpo into downtown which took nearly two hours each way by train.

That fall also marked the collapse of many Asian countries' economies, and by the next spring our ESL program at Valpo had lost 1/3 of its students, and it became evident that there were going to be some job cuts among our staff before the next fall term. Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1998, Michelle had started commuting to Chicago via a vanpool. One of the people in her vanpool was a guy working in IT who told her that the bank he was working for was desperate to find people to fill their technical support jobs. Once Michelle told him about my job plight, he asked if i would be interested in a job in his department. This was right about the time that the Internet field was really taking off and computer jobs were everywhere. So, this ended up being a no-brainer decision for me: (a) stay in a low-paying teaching position in NW Indiana with almost no job security and limited future prospects or (b) take a well-paying job with almost limitless career potential in computer tech support at a large company with great benefits located in the Loop.

There was only one catch: i had no engineering or technical background and knew next to nothing about PCs. Not to say i was a computer neophyte; i knew a lot about computers, but my 12 years of computer experience up to that point had been exclusively on Macs. My only experience with PCs had, in fact, been at my nine-month stint at Valpo. So, i had to take a self-taught crash course in PC support. My first few months at my new job were a bit rough, but i gleaned a lot of information from my colleagues and was able to make great strides in my work in relatively short time. All this to say that if a liberal-arts trained, technically-challenged dufus like myself can make a career switch to the computer field, almost anyone can. (In fact, we have a close friend who has!)

Dot Your Coms and Cross Your ITs

Two years later, however, i was ready for a change: the atmosphere at this company was fairly poisonous, the department was being woefully mismanaged, and i (again) felt like my current job was not going to take me anywhere in the IT field. This was also the height of the Internet boom, and the idea of becoming a Web designer really started to appeal to me. Web design requires creativity and imagination, two skills i was not using in tech support. So, late in 1999 i started taking some online Web design courses and taught myself HTML and all things Web-related. The next spring, i left the bank and landed a job at Heller Financial (now part of GE Capital), only to be headhunted three months later by my old boss, Gary – the one who had originally gotten me into the IT industry – who had just become the CTO at a dot-com startup. So, i left the job i had just settled into at Heller and became the Web developer for this new company, Dynamic Trade, which has since changed its name to Performics.

Being a "dot-commer" is, well, pretty cool – economic collapses notwithstanding. The atmosphere is casual, the staff is young and vibrant (i am the 4th oldest person out of around 70 employees in the company) and Chicago is a kickass place to live and work. I also realize that i am one of the lucky ones in this field because (a) i still have a job and (b) our company has not only survived the "dot-bomb" bust but has actually become profitable. Of course, in this volatile economy, who knows what will happen a few months down the road, but right now this is a good place to be and a good job to have. If anyone had told me 10 years ago that this is where i'd be in 2002, though, i would've laughed hysterically. Sometimes i still do, anyway, at the unlikeliness of it all.

So, while i have been changing careers like college majors the past five years, what has Michelle been doing? Well, she is still working for the same company (although it was bought out by Cendant shortly after she started working there), and has gone from an entry-level job as a cross-cultural Training Specialist to become Project Manager for Cendant Mobility Services, heading up – of all things – an IT project. If you asked Michelle about her career path, I think she would echo my sentiments.

Life can lead you down some strange roads, can't it? It will be very interesting to see what the rest of this decade brings...