Fate brought us to Kirkland.

Now fate has brought me to this, typing on a keyboard again.

I thought this was all in the past, since I accepted a buyout offer from the Seattle Times, where I spent a career as a reporter and editor. But then an opening came up here, at the Kirkland Reporter, to fill in for a reporter on leave, so I’m back at a keyboard.

That’s a great opportunity in a number of ways, but one of them, for me, leads to pondering that role of fate.

It’s why my family and I arrived here in the first place. We were trying to buy a house in Montlake, in Seattle, mostly because it was an easy commute to my job. But the deal fell through, and we found a back-up place, a 1909 house in downtown Kirkland.

We’ve been here ever since, with me spending decades at the Times, and in Kirkland. That’s come to have some odd implications, like how it’s nearly impossible for me to walk along a street and not think of how maybe something just looks like a house to other people, but to me it brings thoughts of who lived there, of things like people in the neighborhood who failed or succeeded, divorced or stayed together, of kids that got in trouble in junior high school and how others graduated from college.

It was living in that house that also perhaps first got me to seriously thinking about how a city functions.

We bought it from a man who worked at the Lake Washington Shipyards, where Carillon Point now stands, and we’d often come across remnants of that life—old metal-working hammers, a dustpan fabricated in a shop.

That came to make me sometimes think of how his life must have been, and how mine was so different, and the consequences for a city.

The home’s former owner, I came to think, would have commuted about two miles down Lake Washington Boulevard to work. On his way home, he could stop at Richardson’s 5-and-10, the J.C. Penney’s, where a new Mexican restaurant is going now, after a Mediterranean place failed, and maybe stop for screws or nails at two hardware stores, Coast-to-Coast or Bryant’s.

Then the shipyards closed. People like me bought the houses. And instead of living and working and playing in the town, things like such transportation improvements as the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge made it possible for us to work far from where we lived.

So we did, with disastrous effects for the city. Thinking it through, I came to ponder how Kirkland then was a city of maybe 40,000 people. If half of them were kids, that left maybe 20,000 adults. And if half or more of the adults, with two-parent working families becoming the norm, went off to work every day, that would leave maybe 5,000 people in town.

How, I wondered, could a city survive if most of its population went somewhere else every day?

The answer, over the years, became readily apparent. The stores closed. Those transportation improvements not only made it possible to leave for work, but to buy things. Malls thrived.

Of course, the city has partly prospered in other ways. Restaurants and coffee shops abound. Consignment shops have arrived. Software industries unknown in the shipyard days have brought several thousand workers to the city.

Yet it’s still impossible to buy an electric drill or a ski jacket in Kirkland, and unanswered questions remain of whether increasing number of condos and apartments can provide the sense of community once provided by someone stopping at the dime store on the way home.

Aside from such issues, which perplex cities across the country, there are more personal questions lingering for me, among them how my career seems to have both started and is ending in Kirkland.

It’s impossible for me to forget how it began. I was working as an editor on what’s called the city desk at the Times, when a woman and her child were killed in a head-on collision on a rainy afternoon on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge.

Perhaps because the woman was from Kirkland, where I lived, I happened to mention to another editor that I wondered what really happened.

Unknowingly, I had asked a question that would essentially guide the rest of my life.

To answer the question, the kind of work that I would come to do for years played itself out. I learned the woman’s car had been taken to a tow lot, a place a few blocks from the Times, which would come to be renowned for how a pink “toe” truck was parked there.

I went to the wrecking lot, and in a reminder to how once upon a time, there were no guards at airports and you could just walk into a towing lot, I found the car. I went through the glove compartment. Inside, I noticed a receipt dated a day or so before the crash, from a Kirkland gas station.

I went to the Texaco station on State Street, which later became Cypress Tree Furniture Refinishing and now is an apartment complex, and asked the owner if he remembered anything about the sale.

He remembered it all. The woman had been on welfare. All the tires on her car were bald. She only had enough money for two tires, so the owner put them on the back, the best place for driving in rain, but warned her the car was unsafe. She shrugged, he remembered. She had to get to Port Townsend for Thanksgiving. She died on the way home.

The implications were clear. If she’d had enough money for four tires, she’d still be alive.

Fate, I thought. Partly because of the crash and the story, the state installed an anti-collision “Jersey barrier” across the bridge, and in another sobering thought, it’s worth considering how the bridge originally was built with just a paint stripe separating four lanes of opposing 60-mph traffic.

I also thought the story was unusual. It wasn’t. I would come to write thousands of such stories, about people who were shot or stabbed or died in collisions.

One that I can’t forget now, because of a recent event in Kirkland, involved a woman named Mary Johnsen, who was walking with her husband along a road on the Sammamish Plateau one afternoon in 1997.

A minivan came from behind them and struck Johnsen, killing her.

The minivan was driven by Susan West, who turned out to be the drunkest driver ever then arrested in state history, with a 0.34 reading.

At her sentencing, a judge described West as a “human bomb.” She spent six years in prison, was released, and once more was arrested for driving under the influence.

Fate, I thought again. What are the chances that someone would be walking along a Sammamish road on a nice afternoon and the drunkest driver in history would come along and kill them?

A good question, I thought. In 2006, I tried to answer it, with myself and another reporter spending months looking at some 200,000 DUI tickets issued since 2000.

What we found, as reporters often do, was both surprising and upsetting.

A main conclusion: Just 43 percent of DUI tickets ever result in a DUI conviction. The bulk of them are reduced to a lesser charge, such as reckless driving.

Still, it seemed like that was the end of that, for me. The questions had been answered. Enough.

Then came this Kirkland Reporter offer, and I’m thinking of perhaps how I missed being at a keyboard.

Yet, as I type this, I’m also thinking of that major Kirkland news event.

On a nice Sunday afternoon last month, Steve Lacey, a Google engineer who lived close enough to his work that he could walk from his home near Everest Park to Google’s Kirkland offices, went to Costco on an errand.

On his way home, an SUV driven by a man now accused of vehicular homicide crossed over several traffic lanes and landed on Lacey’s car, killing him.

For me, and probably countless other people, it seems nearly impossible to consider what happened that day and not wonder how such an event could come to occur.

Unfortunately, it’s something I’ve considered innumerable times.

I’ve never found the answer.

But I take some solace in words from another writer. “There is no new thing under the sun,” someone wrote in Ecclesiastes more than 2,000 years ago. So there is perhaps some strength to be found in realizing the challenges we face now, whether they concern the growth of a city, the death of a driver, or even how a weekly newspaper in Kirkland should be published, are not unprecedented, and somehow, it all works out.

It’s nice to be typing again.