A Phone Call, and a Changed Life

This is a blog about a phone call that took place 25 years ago last month. If the call had never been made, or I hadn’t been there to answer it, I wouldn’t be writing this blog right now. I wouldn’t be married to my wife. We wouldn’t have our two daughters. I wouldn’t be living where I’m living, or met a lot of people who later became good friends. God knows where I’d be, or if I’d even be at all.

It’s not just a blog about that phone call, though. It’s also about the seemingly random and minor events that can send your life on a trajectory you might never have conceived of or imagined.

I say “random” because I’ve always subscribed to the theory that life is mostly a series of random events and accidents. Things randomly happen which cause other things to happen, creating a domino effect that keeps rolling and rolling into the rest of forever.

For example, let’s say a pretty red leaf falls on the ground and you bend over to pick it up. When you do, it blows away just enough that you make a quick move to grab it and strain your shoulder. You go to the doctor, who prescribes a mild pain medication. You drive to the pharmacy to get the medication. In the pharmacy the woman in front of you pays for her order but forgets her cell phone as she leaves the cashier. You chase after her as she walks to her car. You give her the cell phone, she thanks you, and you strike up a conversation. Three years later you’re married with a new baby.

All because a pretty red leaf fell to the ground.

Some will call it fate, or destiny, driven by an unseen, cosmic force that guides your life from the cradle to the grave. According to this school of thought, everything is written into the script way ahead of time and we’re mostly powerless to change it.

Me? I call it a random event that turned into a happy ending.

But I could be wrong.

There are times, I admit, when things happen in life that have an inexplicable, fate-like quality to them. I look at my life now and wonder how in the world I got here. I have a beautiful family that didn’t come along until I was well past the age when most people start a family. We live in northern New Jersey, 30 minutes from Manhattan, after spending more than five years in London in a nice townhouse by the Thames. We spent those years traveling around Europe, experiencing things that would have once seemed impossible to me. We’re not wealthy, but we’re comfortable. Our lives are not perfect, but they’re pretty damn good.

I’ve been blessed, and don’t think for a moment I don’t give thanks often.

*****

Cut back 25 years, to the summer of 1999.

I was 40 years old at the time, single, living in a rundown, one-bedroom apartment in a tattered old residential building in downtown Charlotte, NC, that would see the wrecking ball about a year later. I had a job as a reporter for a local newspaper. The paper treated me well and let me do the occasional interesting article, but most of the time the job bored me out of my skull. I earned the typical middling journalist salary and had little money to speak of. Maybe a thousand bucks or so in the bank. I had debt out the wazoo – credit card debt, the worst kind. I had few possessions of value. A used Nissan Sentra. A small TV. A stereo system. A secondhand Trek bicycle.

I had some wonderful friends, and we had some wonderful times, but there was a gnawing inside of me that kept grinding away little by little, bit by bit.

I remember staring out the window one day that summer, during one of those periodic episodes of self-reflection, and wondering how I got to this place in life: middle-aged, bored, uninspired, anonymous, living in a cheap apartment in my hometown while most of my friends had moved on to greater things, whether it was raising families or building wealth or seeing the world or living lives rich with artistic or spiritual fulfillment.

I had lived most of my life within a 20-mile radius of where I grew up (except for a few years in college and a couple of short stints at nowhere jobs in nowhere places). I’d always dreamed of seeing the world, but I’d mostly seen Mecklenburg County. I was a serial underachiever, never living up to the potential I saw in myself or the ambitions I’d mapped out.

Staring out the window that day in 1999, I entertained brief thoughts of what it might be like to just disappear from view. Leave it all behind. Vanish into thin air. I wasn’t really depressed. More just tired, bored, empty. The thought of vanishing had an oddly calming and liberating effect on me, and I immediately snapped back into a better frame of mind. I’m not sure what I did next. Probably cracked a beer, put on an album and made some spaghetti.

A couple of weeks later, in August 1999, I got a call from an old friend. Let’s call her J. Her call came out of the blue — the very last thing I might have expected. I hadn’t heard from her in years. I had no idea what had become of her. She told me she was living in Wallingford, Connecticut. She’d been there a couple of years as part of one of those nurse travel programs. I’d never even heard of Wallingford, Connecticut.

“Why don’t you come up and visit?” J said over the phone.

I thought it over for about a half-second and said yep, that sounds like a real swell idea.

So, I did. I took a few days off, piled into my Sentra and hauled the 13 hours or so up to Wallingford in a single drive.

J was living in a two-bedroom apartment set up in the back yard of some guy’s house. It was one of those pretty old white New England homes, not far from town. J had recently split from her boyfriend and was living alone. We kicked around New England for a few days – Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine. We had a good time. It was a nice break from the grind, much needed.

I said goodbye and headed back home to the rundown apartment and unfulfilling job in Charlotte.

A couple weeks later I had an epiphany. I got on the phone and called J in Connecticut.

“I’m thinking about moving up there,” I told her. “I can help out with the rent.”

Sure, she said. She’d love to have me.

*****

My plan was to find a job in the New York metro area. Like many writers and journalists, I’d always dreamed of living and working in the Big Apple. Wallingford wasn’t exactly a short hop to Manhattan. You had to drive about 20 minutes to the New Haven train station and then take the Metro North to Grand Central Terminal, which was about a 90-minute commute. Even so, it was doable. It sure wasn’t doable from Charlotte.

So, I put my notice in at work, canceled my apartment lease, and moved to Wallingford on September 30, 1999 – roughly 25 years ago to the day. I still remember the date. Probably always will.

After I arrived I spent a lot of time in the New Haven, Connecticut library, researching job opportunities, making copies of my news clips, and printing out resumes and cover letters. I sent dozens of resumes around. About a month later I found a job writing industry reports for a company down in Stamford, Conn. The economy was roaring and people were hiring.

A couple of months after that I heard back from a financial newspaper I’d applied to. The paper was based in Los Angeles but had a bureau in midtown Manhattan, right near Grand Central. They wanted to interview me for a reporter’s job. Since they were based in L.A., we did the interview by phone. A couple weeks later they offered me the job.

Goodbye, Stamford.

*****

I’ll never forget my first day commuting into New York City. It was a long train ride. I spent most of it listening to Dave Brubeck’s “Time Out” on my old Sony Walkman and staring out the window, filled with joy and excitement. I was like a kid at Disney World. I could barely contain myself. Finally! New York! I was actually going to be a reporter in the Big GD Apple! A dream come true! It took me 41 years, but here I was.

The rest happened quickly. I spent about nine months at the New York bureau, commuting first from Connecticut and then from New Jersey, where I lived with another old friend. The newspaper offered me a promotion to an editor position that required me to move to Los Angeles. I took the promotion and headed west in November of 2000. I phoned J to say goodbye. It was the last time we’ve spoken.

I drove west in the Nissan and arrived in L.A. a few days later. A few days after that I walked into the L.A. office and met my new workmates. Some became great friends. One, Susan, became my wife. I spent a few years in L.A., enjoyed life there, riding my bike on the beach and bopping around California. But I knew I wanted to head back to New York.

In 2003 Susan and I moved east, to Connecticut. A year later we got married (I was 45 years old). In 2005 we got an apartment in midtown Manhattan, spent about three mind-blowing years there, then moved down South for about a decade to buy a home and start a family (by then I was 50). The move across the pond to London came in 2018. The move back across the pond to the States was last year. (Oh, and I wrote a novel you can buy here and here).

None of these things would have happened if not for a phone call I never could have foreseen, during the dead of summer a quarter-century ago, when my life was skidding toward irrelevance.

*****

Like I said, I don’t necessarily believe in fate or destiny. But rarely has a week gone by in the last 25 years when I didn’t think about that phone call from J back in 1999.

What if she hadn’t called? What if I hadn’t been there to answer it? What if she’d had to leave a message on my answering machine? What if she decided she didn’t want to leave a message? What if my answering machine had glitched, as it was prone to do? How might things have been different?

The events that transpired following that call probably never would have happened. No trip to Connecticut. No job offer from New York. No transfer to California. No meeting my wife. No daughters. No London, no here and now at this desk, in this place, writing this blog.

It all happened because I was there to answer a phone call 25 years ago. I guess I believe it was all a random accident.

But I could be wrong.

Note: I originally wrote this blog in 2019, on the 20^th anniversary of J’s phone call. This is an updated version to reflect further changes since then. It occurred to me while re-publishing it that the phase of life that started with that phone call a quarter-century ago – the most important phase for me, by a long shot – might now be making way for the next phase. More on that in the next blog….