Let me tell you a story. A story in bites. In bites as big as America — the big-hearted, broad-shouldered America we ridiculously optimistic newcomers must insist on. Indeed: Depend on.

It’s a local story and also a global one. The kind you can expect, here on the confluence of our two generous river matriarchs, 50 urgent salmon-miles from that grand clockwise sweep of cold North Pacific that sends out Pendleton’s wheat and Beaverton’s chips, then carries back Yokohama pickup trucks and Guangzhou widescreen TVs. Right here, to River City.

The first big bite, happened 70 years ago.

On an early morning, rainy season 1942, Japan’s Imperial Army marched into town, our family’s hometown, Djakarta in the Netherlands East Indies. They took our rubber and oil, they took our young women, they enslaved our teenaged dad and his brothers.

Our boys all made it back, all broken and bitter. The oldest shipped home from Nagasaki. After the Yanks liberated us. But our sisters and daughters and wives never returned. For the shame of it, we never spoke of it, again. Ampun’illaah.

Sixty-five fast years later

That furious war of course ended with the awful atomic bombing of Hiroshima’s soldiers, shopkeepers, and café clerks, followed by the same fate for Nagasaki’s sleeping grandpas, working aunties, and earnest school kids.

Sixty-five years later, our mom met, quite by coincidence — if your spiritual tradition allows for auspicious accidents — Takamichi Okabe, a scholar and diplomat who during working hours represents the government of Japan as Portland’s consul-general, but on that soft summer evening was simply present expressing his own deep personal respect.

Our ma had just arrived on that circular sweep of turgid wind and water mentioned earlier; Okabe-san had strolled down from his tidy downtown office to the Japanese American Historical Plaza. Our mom is small and energetic, Okabe-san is tall and elegant. When they met, he bowed low. Lower than her five feet — a gesture full of meaning among Asians on both sides of our deep blue sea. His humbleness soothed her. She paused. Our anguished histories paused. Our achy planet paused. A shadow passed from all of us, passed from all of that. I turned toward our swollen Willamette to hide a river of tears.

Fifty short years ago

Conscientious Portlanders have been commemorating the sorrow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and raising the issues of nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation for 50 years in a row. August 6, 2012 continues this tradition.

The first such event, our grandelder of nuclear protest Carol Umer will tell you, was on August 6, 1962. Back then, the United States and the Soviet Union were at the brink of nuclear confrontation over the political and military division of Europe. Ms. Umer, an organizer for Portland Women for Peace way back then and an organizer with Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility today, recalls how in 1962 both Cold War rivals were still determinedly testing atomic weapons in the open atmosphere. In our shared air.

Committed to begin local opposition to nuclear power, Ms. Umer and her college classmates organized a walk around Portland approximating the area of Hiroshima neighborhoods, businesses, and workplaces incinerated by the detonation of that first atomic device.

"Families called out by Portland Women for Peace, by American Friends Service Committee, and Fellowship for Reconciliation," she remembers, "met our marchers in the city center for that very first observance, pledging to work tirelessly for abolition of nuclear weapons."

This year, on another August 6 evening, Ms. Umer again played her part organizing another demonstration of Portland opposition to the use of the kind of power that destroyed two vigorous cities 67 years ago, that shifted national budgets and international relations forever, that killed and wounded and left homeless thousands more when its civilian use has gone terribly-terribly wrong.

Takamichi Okabe was also there, again as a simply sincere Japanese citizen and Portland resident. And our family went too, to tell Okabe-san how we sorrow for Sendai’s hungry tsunami and for Fukushima’s ongoing nightmare.

Kathleen Flenniken, poet laureate of Washington State, recited for us all. Ms. Flenniken was raised downstream and downwind from the same aging nuclear power plant that produced America’s first weapons-grade plutonium. The flash that sent all those souls to heaven in a single searing exhalation 67 years ago.

The natural symmetry of it all

The symmetry of it all — of this place on these rivers, of this history bringing everyone here, of these families gathering on another sultry August evening — is awesome. Something we’ve come to understand, here on the confluence of these grand river systems and our shared circulating sea. Here on the parkway named for that iconic Japanese American, Mr. Bill Naito — just a few blocks east of where Portlanders erased Japantown, in the weeks after the United States declared war on Imperial Japan. Just a few weeks before our father and his brothers were taken from their mother, and our ma got into boy-pants and got that bad haircut.

"Out of the Shadows," Portland’s 50th year of remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, included a citywide event called the "Shadows Project." Funded by the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the participatory art project chalked human outlines in Portland parks and on Portland sidewalks, symbolizing those hundreds of thousands of sleeping, waking, and working elders, parents, and children vaporized by Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s atomic bombs. One bomb each. Sixty-seven years ago.

Shadows seared into those two cities’ sidewalks, shadows seared in to our souls.

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"Out of the Shadows" was co-sponsored by Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, Alliance for Democracy, American Friends Service Committee, American Iranian Friendship Council, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, Greenpeace, Humanists of Greater Portland, Japanese Ancestral Society, Japanese Garden Society, KBOO Radio, Multnomah Meeting of Friends, Oregon Buddhist Temple, Oregon Hiroshima Club, Oregon Nikkei Endowment, Peace and Justice Works Iraq Affinity Group, Peace House, Portland Japanese American Citizens League, Portland Japanese Garden, Portland Peaceful Response Coalition, Regional Arts & Culture Council, SGI-USA Oregon Buddhists, Sisters of the Road, Veterans for Peace Chapter 72, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. To learn more about Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, call (503) 274-2720 or visit <www.oregonpsr.org>.