At dinner with a group of longtime friends recently, Tony raised a glass to toast the 44th anniversary of the day he almost died.

By all rights, he should have been dead that fateful summer night in 1966, an evening when he was doing the most ordinary thing a 15-year-old boy could be doing, enjoying a huge pasta dinner with his mom and her friend at a quiet neighborhood Italian restaurant in what was then our sleepy little beachside town.

As he told the story again, as he has many times in the 44 years since that night, it was easy to see the emotions cloud his handsome face. Even though I’ve heard the story before, it seems each time he tells it, fresh details emerge as memory is excavated.

Before he began recalling the story for us again, I asked him if the story has less power now, all these years later, with each telling. He agreed that the power of it has diminished considerably over time, but I could see that telling it again put him right back in time, back to the utter bewilderment and shock of what happened. It was profoundly life-altering.

Tony was trying to bulk up that summer so he could go out for football. He wanted badly to play on the team with the other guys he’d known since elementary and junior high school (some of whom were sitting with us on this 44th «Happy to be Alive» anniversary night).

Tony convinced his mom that he needed lots of pasta to support his muscle-building mode so they decided to go out for Italian food. They were first seated farther back in the restaurant but a noisy group nearby prompted his mom to ask for a different table and one nearer the window was offered. The two older women faced the street view while Tony had his back to the window and front door. He never saw what was coming.

A Chevy Bel-Air doing 65 mph piloted by a drunk failed to negotiate a curve in the road just outside the restaurant, jumped the curb and barreled through the front windows and door, shoving walls, furniture and people 40 feet into the business next door. Tony recalls the odd sensation of lying on his back on the hood of a car, moving through space, accompanied by unearthly sounds of human voices, splintering glass, and the deafening roar of metal and wood breakage.

He remembered not being able to open his eyes because there were shards of glass from the restaurant’s windows in his eyes. He remembered being lifted onto a stretcher, feeling terrible pain, knowing his body was broken.

He remembered the questions the paramedics asked him as they tried to keep him conscious on the way to the hospital. He remembered that he was not given painkillers for the broken back he suffered because the doctors were concerned about brain hemorrhage.

It was miraculous that no one died in the horrific accident. His mom suffered head injuries but recovered fairly quickly. Her friend had many internal injuries and was hospitalized for half a year. Tony was in the hospital for a week and released with a full body cast that he wore for his first 6 months of high school while his vertebrae repaired.

Tony never was able to play football. Instead, he had to learn about adaptability–the ability to shift his thinking and adapt to the new way of being. He has coped with back pain almost daily since that summer night. His innate athleticism allowed him to play competitive tennis for awhile, but the after effects of the accident have continued to plague him with back pain. With growing awareness of the body he would now have to live with, in his 30s he took up yoga and found it to be the ideal exercise for him as he built strength and flexibility to manage the pain.

That accident was a truly defining moment. The definition of who Tony thought he was going to be changed abruptly, dramatically, without warning of any sort.

After Tony’s story, our dinner table conversation turned to defining moments. We’ve all had them. Maybe not as dramatic or traumatic as Tony’s, but those moments of suspended reality, when we know on the deepest cellular level that something big has shifted or changed for us in that moment.

Or is about to change, as in premonition.

Sometimes you don’t recognize a defining moment until it has passed. Other times you feel everything slowing down, in a slow-motion sensation of hyper-awareness that awakens and vibrates your whole being. It’s almost as if you enter a process of becoming The Observer of your life, stepping outside yourself even while still being The Experiencer of feelings and emotions, forming a new «reality» such as it may be.

No matter what form it takes, one thing is certain: Who you were before the defining moment is infinitely and forever changed.

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