I probably wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for him.

One thing leads to another, you know?

He was a handful of years older than me. Seemed like a lifetime separated us as cousins when I was a kid, but now that age gap feels like barely a breath.

Death does that.

I was just out of college, and miserable at my job in Boston’s financial district, when I came home for Christmas. He was renting a house on the beach in Hermosa, and one morning I stopped in after surfing. A friend of his emerged from the depths of the hallway, and I found her beautiful in ways a 22 year old might. Open, confident, charismatic…everything I wasn’t.

He suggested I play a couple of songs for her, and after some cajoling, I sheepishly obliged. I was new to this whole being-vulnerable-in-front-of-other-people-thing, and kept my eyes trained on the floor while I stumbled through the songs I’d written.

She was beaming when I finally looked up, and asked when my next show was.

Next show?

I’d never done a show. Or even entertained the possibility. She was dumbfounded and asked why not. I said I was working for a mutual funds company, which was the responsible thing to do right out of college, and just wrote songs as a way to get out whatever was in me.

She shook her head, scolded me for not pursuing music, and told me I had something to give to the world.
I believed her.

And that’s how this journey began. I quit my job and moved to the Pacific Northwest a few months later, chasing both her and a new dream, and picked up a little black Labrador on the way.

My first dog.

My first show would follow, after my muse moved on to someone else and I moved from her town to Seattle.

Then my first album, and a whole string of firsts I’d never had the courage to dream of.

The fork in the road that led to who I am today started right there, that late December morning, when she walked into my cousin’s living room.

Which is why I probably wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for him.

How our trajectories can shift in the quietest of moments, in ways we can’t comprehend at the time.

Rest in peace, Jason.

You made a difference.