They were on bicycles and had to pass through a rough neighborhood to get there. They rode into a park, and as they stopped at a drinking fountain, four kids who couldn't have been more than 11 or 12 approached and asked for a match.
Lowenfels said they didn't have any and started to pedal away. He glanced back and saw his date being held at gunpoint.

"I went back and asked what was going on, and the kid with the gun said, 'We're going to shoot her blue eyes out.'
"Ah, I didn't think that was a great idea, and we had a little discussion about it. I got off my bicycle, and at point-blank range they pulled the trigger."

"This woman I was with happened to be a nurse, and she saved my life."
She chased him across the street and screamed for someone in the gathering crowd to call an ambulance while she kept him alive.

Lowenfels woke up the next morning in the hospital, and there she was. So were doctors, poking needles into his feet to see if he was paralyzed.
"They couldn't believe I could talk, I could feel, I could hear, that I could see. It was like shooting into a telephone and not hitting any of the wires inside.
"So she was there, and I said, 'You know, you saved my life, and there's this thing that if you save someone's life, then you're responsible for that life. So let's get married."

She agreed. He and Judith Hoersting, registered nurse, artist, master gardener and soul mate, will have been married 32 years in March.
"And now we have two wonderful kids and a great marriage," Lowenfels said. "It convinced me more than anything else in my life that you can make something good happen out of anything bad."

That bullet is still in his neck. He can feel it now and then, especially on cold days or if he drinks something hot like coffee. For years he kept an X-ray of it in his office to remind him that every day, from that day forward, is a gift.
That bullet changed everything: how he wanted to live, where he wanted to live.
"We're going as far away from here as we can go without a passport," he said he told his wife-to-be. "And that's why we ended up in Anchorage."

That's because Lowenfels is a third-generation gardening geek. His grandfather was so avid about it, he and his wife had his-and-hers greenhouses, and Lowenfels doesn't remember ever seeing them trespass on each other's territory.

His father inherited that passion. His gardens were his sanctuary, especially since he reluctantly took over the family butter and margarine business.

That family business explains why the happy boy on the cover of Happy Boy Margarine looks so familiar. Sporting a striped shirt, a butch and a big grin, a picture taken in the '50s of a 6-year-old Lowenfels is still on the package of this East Coast margarine, even though his family got out of the business years ago.

As an antidote to the world of business, Lowenfels' father raised his family on a gentleman's farm -- eight acres of lawns, gardens, orchards and arbors -- in Scarsdale, N.Y., just outside New York City. Where other kids had soda pop in their refrigerators, in the Lowenfels' it was homemade apple cider. Where other dads brought bottles of wine to dinner parties, his brought armloads of zucchini.

"We grew almost all our own food, if you can imagine that," Lowenfels said. "This was in a community that at the time was the richest community in the United States. I never realized that everybody else in Scarsdale wasn't doing the same thing. People had vegetable gardens, but they didn't have a two-acre vegetable garden. They weren't eating lettuce at home in the wintertime that was growing in their well house. And they didn't have 80 to 90 rhubarb plants. Good god.

"If I wanted to have anything to do with my dad, I had to go out in the garden. So I was always a gardener -- sort of an indentured servant. And that's how I got into this."