Josh Gordon can’t remember the first time he broke into song while working the checkout counter at the People’s Food Co-op. But he was touched when customers told him that he had a good voice—and then began suggesting tunes and singing along.

“It’s a really strange kind of thing,” he says. “There will be, like, six or seven people in the store singing the same song. Like a little choir, you know?”

Whether it’s something piped through the store sound system or a phrase from Dionne Warwick’s “A House Is Not a Home,” no one seems to mind. “It’s a very friendly place,” says Gordon, who’s worked at the co-op for almost two years. “It’s not a corporate supermarket.”

Even customers who refrain from singing seem to enjoy his mellow presence. Gordon says the constant interaction with friendly colleagues and customers has been restorative for him, too.

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During his lunch break one recent Sunday, Gordon joins me on a bench in Sculpture Plaza, the small park in front of the store.

A tall man in sunglasses and a baseball cap, he wears his black co-op apron over a crisp plaid shirt and jeans. A young guy wearing a skirt and a dazed expression approaches us. Calling him by name, Gordon says gently, “I can’t talk now.” The man holds out a cigarette, and Gordon offers his lighter.

“You don’t know what’s going on,” he says, watching the man leave. “But I treat him like I treat anybody else, and I expect him to treat me the same way I treat him: with a certain respect. He’s just another human soul.”

Deep-voiced and contemplative, Gordon says he hesitated about being profiled but challenged himself to go ahead. “My nature is to be sort of aloof and, you know, disengage,” he says, but he’s working to change that.

A Detroit native, he first lived in Ann Arbor in the 1980s, when he earned degrees in English and law at the U-M. He moved back to the city to practice, doing mainly criminal defense.

Attorney Todd Perkins, whose worked with Gordon intermittently for years, remembers being wowed. “Hands down, he’s one of the greatest legal minds I’ve ever encountered,” Perkins says, standing out both for his writing and analysis and in the courtroom.

Gordon says he enjoyed preparing cases—“they were kind of like putting together puzzles”—and did thousands of trials. But while he knew how to project confidence, underneath he was plagued by doubts. Playing what felt like a role meant “there was a real rejection of self.”

His courtroom successes “didn’t bring me any satisfaction,” he says. “I could win case after case and was miserable.”

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He traces some of his insecurity to a difficult childhood. The third of six sons from his mother’s two marriages, Gordon grew up near Hamtramck, in a house bought by his grandfather, who had integrated a predominantly Italian neighborhood.

His stepfather was a janitor and his mother a secretary. She pressed books on the boys and sent them to Catholic schools, where she believed they’d get a better education than in the city’s struggling public schools. But both parents drank heavily, and the kids grew up with that. They died relatively young, Gordon says, “basically of substance abuse.”

He’d been the family’s academic star, graduating from East Catholic High School, and then attending the U-M on scholarship. He was twenty-seven and starting his legal career when his mother died. Before her death, she asked him to take in his youngest brother, Brian Meeks, then twelve.

“It was definitely difficult,” says Meeks, who now lives in Ann Arbor. Like others, he saw his brother as “a rising star” in Detroit’s legal world—but also saw signs of problems.

As a solo practitioner Gordon set his own schedule, which made it easy to drift from depression to alcohol and drugs. “I was sort of hit and miss,” he says. “I would show up and then disappear.”

Then the pandemic hit. Further isolated, he found himself thinking about suicide. “It only lasted for about two or three hours,” he says. “But it was enough. It pushed me over. I knew I had to do something different.”

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Seeking a clean break, he moved back to Ann Arbor and entered a month-long treatment program at Dawn Farm. He feared he might be unemployable, but after completing the program, he learned through the group Recovery Is Good Business that the co-op was “accommodating to recovering individuals.” To his “shock and amazement,” he was soon at work behind its counter.

Now nineteen months sober, he’s seeing a therapist, something he’d long resisted. The change came, he says, when he realized that the therapist wasn’t trying to change his life—they were giving him permission to change it. The onetime English major compares it to Greek dramas and Shakespeare, where the protagonist ultimately realizes he’s searching for himself.

“You have to dare yourself to be, to live, differently. Because the drugs, gambling, whatever—those things are, you know, they’re consistent. You do this, that happens. You go here, that happens. You take this, that happens …”

Working at the co-op is his way of living differently. Its structure “keeps me in the present.

“Being at a cash register and dealing with people constantly—you know, reaching out to people and having people like me, and me liking them,” he says, has been an “almost spiritual” experience.

And he has friends again. While he “always had people that cared about me,” he says, “I was always so guarded” that they didn’t get close. But “a lot of people that I had lost contact with when I went out spiraling and all, doing my own thing—I see them now. A lot of the times, I realize, I misconstrued and misperceived other people that really cared about me—I just could not receive it.”

“He’s a great guy, very smart,” says Stephen, a long-time co-op worker. “He knows a lot [and] he draws people in.”

Stephen was particularly struck with how Gordon’s friendly greetings built a rapport with a “non-verbal” boy who accompanies his mother to the store. “He made the kid feel he was in a safe space,” and eventually, to everyone’s astonishment, the boy spoke to him.

And now that they’re in the same city again, he and Meeks see each other regularly. “It takes a lot of bravery, a lot of self-examination,” Meeks says of his brother’s efforts to reclaim his life.

“I’m very, very optimistic.”

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Gordon speaks of someday practicing law again but is not speculating on when.

“I question whether he should come back,” says Perkins, his former boss. “He’s happier now than he ever has been.

“He fits that dynamic, being in Ann Arbor. It quenches his thirst” for exposure to the arts. Cormac McCarthy’s death is prompting Gordon to reread the novelist’s work, and Stephen says they “talk a lot about films.”

Content with a quiet life “at this point in my journey,” Gordon says he tries not to look further “than maybe twenty-four hours in front of me. I just kind of let things unfold, you know, and let things align as they should.

“I’m not chasing anything.” For now, “eight hours a day at that register is a gift that was given to me.”