The Pivotal Month

How everything changed 40 years ago

I can’t remember the exact date, but there was one day in April of 1985 that changed my life, forever. It was 40 years ago this month, and—in the final few minutes before the calendar flips over into May—I’m going to try putting some thoughts down about it because it really is impossible to overstate its impact on my life since the day that it happened.

It was a day in the spring of my junior year in high school, and I was riding in a car with three of my classmates to a high school foreign language competition in Macomb, Illinois. I was riding in the back seat, and it felt good to be out of school for the day. At one point, my classmate lost control of the car, and I remember a violent swerve across the road…….

up to that moment, I was afraid of a lot of things. I couldn’t take swimming lessons because I was afraid of drowning. I was terrified of heights, and of barking dogs especially. I was scared of life, in many ways. And all of that came to an end when I realized how fragile everything on this earth can be.

….I woke up in the back of an ambulance, on the way to a hospital. There was blood on the baseball jersey-type shirt I was wearing, and one leg of my pants had been cut open because I felt a great deal of pain there. I remember getting to the hospital, where a doctor took a look at me. He discovered a shard of glass that had lodged itself in my neck and remarked, apparently to one of the other staff on call, that it “didn’t miss by much.” He then removed the glass and stitched up my neck, where I have carried a souvenir of the incident around ever since.

I remember going home that day and finding the above copy of Rolling Stone with Madonna and Rosanna Arquette waiting for me in the mailbox. I also remember, for some reason, going to school the next day and being told they had made an announcement in school about some sort of a car accident taking place and nobody knowing what the situation was. The days before cellphones and social media were a different place, that’s for sure.

I was gratified to learn that nobody else was injured in the accident that day, but the car had been totalled and that I was only spared because I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and would have been crushed against a tree if I had been. I didn’t wear a seat belt for many years afterward, particularly since there was no law requiring it in the back seat at the time.

I took the ACT for the only time the Saturday after that, and I did fairly well overall, even though the two tests after the break—the social studies and science tests—were not much more than a blur. I was still in some pain, but calling off the test, or retaking it at a later date, never occured to me. The now-routine practice of taking the test several times and only counting the highest scores on the different parts of the test toward college applications hadn’t come into use yet, but in the end I’ll always link these two events together, in some way.

But the main result of the accident—and the reason I’m so thankful that it happened—is that the fears I once carried around with me had immediately disappeared. Call it providence or fate or whatever else it was, but it simply wasn’t my time to go. And if it had been my time on that day, I would have missed out on going to college and living in Chicago for 35 years, and surfing the internet and having a family, and seeing the Bears and the Cubs winning championships, and going to New York and Paris and all the other places that I’ve been to, and driving a car and owning a house and doing things that I never could have imagined when I was not quite 17 years old.

My time is still out there somewhere, whether that will happen tomorrow or next year or in another 15 years, 12 days and 36 minutes from now. And whenever it comes there won’t be a single regret from me, because I’ve now had forty years and a few days that I was freed up to enjoy, thanks to a shard of glass that once found my neck and didn’t miss by much.