Sheldon Siegel can tell you exactly where he was on July 1, 1993. That day is etched in his memory. It was a day that inadvertently launched a new career. A day when things changed, forever. July 1, 1993 was his “bottom of the ninth” moment.
At 2:57 p.m. on that particular Thursday, Sheldon was working in his office at 101 California Street in downtown San Francisco. You see, Sheldon is an attorney, and on that particular day he was in his office at Pettit and Martin doing whatever it is that lawyers do, when a gunman entered the building, made his way to the 34th floor and began shooting.
“It was three o’clock in the afternoon on July 1, 1993. I was sitting in my office at Pettit & Martin on the thirty-sixth floor of the 101 California tower when a crazed former client came to our offices with two AK-47 semi-automatic machine guns and a loaded pistol. He gunned down eight people and wounded a half dozen others. It was the worst day of my life. I was lucky. He never made his way to the thirty-sixth floor. The 101 California massacre, as it has come to be known, had a profound impact on me in many ways. It made me appreciate my wife and kids. It gave me some greater perspective. It made me terribly uncomfortable about writing a book about a murder in a law firm. On the other hand, it made me think about all of the things that I wanted to do. It made me appreciate that you should try to do those things sooner rather than later. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a novel.” (quote from here).
I met Sheldon a few years ago when our kids played baseball together. Shel was the team's first base coach, an unassuming Chicagoan with a dry sense of humor and a diehard White Sox fan. Enough said. What was not to like? He introduced himself as a writer who played a lawyer in his spare time. ‘Was he serious?’ I asked, when we broke to outfit the boys in uniforms. He opened his briefcase and handed me a stack of no less than 5 crisp paperbacks. I laughed. He did too.
By the first practice I was halfway through the first one, Special Circumstances, and not surprisingly I was really enjoying it. During the season when I didn’t have my nose buried in the scorebook keeping track of balls and strikes, I was reading my way through all five of those paperbacks all the while getting editorial comments from the author himself. This was too good to be true.
Several months ago a package arrived in the mail. It was Judgement Day, Sheldon’s sixth novel, in manuscript form. I poured through the pages as quickly as I could and like the other 5, I loved this one too. The newest book was released this past May.
What does it take to wake us up? How do we tune in and pay attention to what is important to us? Sometimes those questions come in a form that we are least expecting, challenging moments like a personal crisis, the loss of a job or the unexpected death of a loved one. When those things happen, do we see opportunities or obstacles? Do we use those moments to evaluate what we are doing, to take a personal inventory and commit ourselves to our dreams? Do we dare ask the question that Sheldon asked that day in July, ‘What is it that I really want to do?’
Will you recognize your bottom of the ninth moment?
Sheldon Siegel will be doing a book signing and reading from Judgement Day tonight, June 18th at Copperfields Books in downtown Petaluma.