Etymology, what does it mean? I could have googled it; instead, I asked my eldest son. You wouldn’t know, he said, you are an engineer! I get that a lot lately. He took IB English in HS and a classics course in med school. At that age I was pushing slide rule and T-square! Taking liberal arts over job language was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

Decades on, a cruel twist of fate compelled me to trade my engineering toolbox for a writer’s. The transition to write a book that had been brewing in my mind wouldn’t be too onerous, I thought. After all, I have published—albeit in engineering and technology journals, written volumes of reports, thesis, articles and oh yes, performance appraisals! However, they weren’t for general public. Following much effort, now looking back, what I’d produced resembled a coil bound state scandal. It proved easier to take an engineer out of engineering, but to take engineering out of his writing needed work.

Soon, I enlisted myself in creative writing and circled through courses, conferences and retreats. In one memorable writers’ circle, I happened to look in the roster of attendees. To my surprise, it was largely populated with, imagine, doctors and lawyers—trusted voices that speak for the masses. I was but a few attendees who didn’t fit into the close link between the two fraternities. My cruel twist of fate involved both. As I surmised, the moderator appeared on the podium and opened with the line, you need to lie to tell the truth! I have heard many versions of the aphorism since. However, I hadn’t been thinking about the lies that led to the truth, but the truth that uncovered the lie. Truth straight up no one?

It was October, Y2K when I left Canada to work in Pittsburgh’s research park, resigned to spend the sunset of my career in the green hills of Monroeville. The loonie was sixty-two cents then. I could’ve toughed it out, kept quiet, and gone on with life. But the episodes kept playing in my mind; and as they did, my compulsion to write kept me awake at night and sleep deprived during the day.

I must have fallen asleep after returning from work. I got out of bed, grabbed my gym bag and went out the door. The sun setting into the cradle of the green hills over the river valley settled my mind and moved my thoughts in a direction that seemed fitting at this stage of my career and our lives. The Oxford apartments in the Monroeville suburb of Pittsburgh were next to a gigantic racquet club we frequented. It preserved our hearts and sanity. Living here was a seismic change, but one that gave me time to regroup and recover, and, most importantly, to reflect.

The sun went down for the day. The elevator on the 8th floor must have come up and down a few times by the time I was snapped back into our modest existence by the noise of the neighbor—a Pittsburgh Steelers football player—on his way to the gym. I went down to the ground level, walked left across the long parking lot decorated with dogwood trees, climbed up the stairs and entered the club through the terrace entrance, thinking that to forget would be to help keep the secret that left my son scarred for life, and shunted him out of his chosen career path. How long does it take a doctor to become a patient? A moment of medical mistake by his colleagues? What had happened that nearly turned him into a bucket of organs, for his chance of recovery to a meaningful functional state declared nil? I was sanguine that I did not have unrealistic expectation of him to survive the ordeal. I refused to let him go, and go along with the notations on his chart.

Ann Landers wisdom, the naked truth is always better than the best-dressed lie, never on display. Like the stubborn Punxsutawney Phil in February, truth took much prodding to make its appearance, and when it did, deals were made between the fraternities and dough rolled from one to the other leaving the shivering survivors in the cold. I’d decided to move to western Pennsylvania in search of peace. Watching the sunset however, as if I was watching it for the first time, I realized that a buried story would be like a buried truth that would save no one from substance abuse, homelessness, or worse, suicide. All of which I would have experienced had I not pursued the honest language of job eons ago. I needed to get back to tell the rest of our story—the story that would otherwise be buried with the sunset of my life.

The time arrived in June 2001. Our tiny Toyota was full to the rear view mirror. I closed the apartment, wrote a note on a ripped corner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and slipped it under the building manager Juanita’s door. The William Penn highway to the Pennsylvania Turnpike north wound like a serpent around a staff hugging the Allegheny Mountains. I thought of dropping by the old research center at the New Kensington exit—just over the Allegheny River Bridge. Instead, I picked up the desolate Interstate 79 to Erie, to the Greater Toronto Area. I’d balance my time between preparing for my next assignment and breaking barriers.

Since then, I completed the book to the delight of my readers, most importantly my son. The word doesn’t sound like entomology or etiology any more. My transformation is complete. But it takes an engineer outside the bubble to write such story. A doctor couldn’t, and be employed. A lawyer? Nah, he seems happy rolling in the dough.