At the end of my second summer in the hot dog business, I put away the stand and reluctantly prepared myself for the next great challenge of my life—high school. I temporarily put thoughts of business out of my mind and determined to succeed in a new arena. I was going to join the debate team and become a champion debater. And so it was that a few months later I found myself in the front seat of the beat-up old station wagon of the debate coach, talking to him as we sped down the Interstate.

It was past midnight and the other five members of my high school debate team had already been asleep for over an hour. Only I was still awake, assigned the job of keeping the coach awake at the wheel so we could reach Toledo for the start of a tournament scheduled to begin at nine the next morning. I had already talked him through New Jersey, across the Delaware Water Gap, and halfway through Pennsylvania when the accident occurred.

We were rocketing down the Pennsylvania Turnpike when our rear wheel suddenly flew off the station wagon. The rear of the car hit the ground, causing the car to lose its brakes and veer wildly out of control. In their sleepy stupors, the others in the car were not immediately aware of what was happening. But I knew exactly what was going on. We were going to die. Or, to be more honest in regard to what I was actually thinking, I was going to die! No sound passed my lips as I pressed my knees against the dashboard, waiting for the inevitable impact. I said nothing as I watched the car knocking down dozens of reflector poles, first on one side of the road and then on the other as the car veered wildly back and forth across the turnpike, and the coach struggled to gain control. At any moment I was sure an eighteen-wheeler would come barreling down the highway and crush our Chevy wagon and everyone in it. During those few minutes before the impact, my life flashed before my eyes. This expression is much overused, but that is what actually happened. Suddenly I saw that if I were to die at that moment, it would have been as if I’d never lived. I had never had a girlfriend. I was even afraid to ask someone for a date. I’d never done anything significant. Since my days at the hot dog stand, I’d never taken a risk or done anything out of the ordinary. In truth, I was just a debate nerd and my friends were other nerds who spent all their time having existential conversations about why we were losers and how hopeless it was to try to escape this reality. I realized, at the moment just before the impact, that I was on my way to wasting my life and that I could have done and accomplished so much more, even as a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore, had I only decided to try.

These thoughts, however, couldn’t save us from any onrushing tractor-trailer trucks. Perhaps it was late enough at night or early enough in the morning that the tractor-trailers that usually fill the nights were all resting for a few minutes. Perhaps G-d made a miracle and spared our six young lives. Or perhaps, as with Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, the moment of my end was so transforming that it actually changed me into a different person who still had a life to live, and out of my former self whose number was up.

Whatever happened, hundreds of perilous yards down the road from where the tire came off, our car came to a halt and lost its other wheel just off the shoulder of the road, literally seconds before three tractor-trailers came hurtling by. Seeing what had occurred, a trucker blocked the road and came running back to see if we were all okay. He radioed on his CB for the police and for a tow truck. The other members of the debate team, now fully roused, were in a panic about how we’d get to Toledo on time. Me, I didn’t care. I was in a reverie, one I’ve never fully come out of, waiting to get back to New York and start my life again.

Previously, I’d run for student body office and, in a class of a thousand, I’d garnered less than one hundred votes. I was considered an unelectable class joke. Now, running again, but with a better self-image, I was narrowly elected to the governing board. And a year later I was elected student body president by a two-thirds majority. I started a new school newspaper. I asked girls out on dates. These dates didn’t work out, but I asked.