25 years ago, in the late afternoon, the San Francisco Giants were about to play game 3 of the World Series. It was 100° in San Francisco, a rare temperature, but typical of October, when we have two or three days of extraordinarily hot weather, hotter than any other time of the year. Earthquake weather was what we called it, and thats exactly what it was. A 7.0 earthquake struck and shook us to our bones, making all of us feel very mortal. We each have those stories from that day, about the fragility of life, its suspension before untimely death--where we were and what it felt like when it started, and what we were thinking as it continued, and what we did next, not knowing if it was really over. We have stories of TV sets that slide off counters and books that flew off shelves, of cracks in ceilings and walls and swaying chandeliers, how the dog howled and the cat screeched, how polite everyone was when they took turns at the intersections where the traffic lights had gone out. And we told of that moment when we finally reached those we loved to confirm our arms and legs were where they should be. We knew that the media was showing the world only the worst of the devastation--the collapsed Bay Bridge, the apartment that fell and burned, the brick facades of buildings piled on the sidewalks. We felt both brave and annoyed that they depicted it differently from what we experienced. They showed the aftermath and not our ongoing nervousness as little temblors continued to pass through earth and into our brains. We ruminated together and shuddered over what might have been--that we could have been elsewhere, the exact unlucky spot, at exactly that fatal moment, but for some reason we changed our minds, or we took a different route home, or we decided not to go to that meeting after all but delay it until the next day. And so, we lived to tell our stories of mortality, often, about how quickly we can go, at any moment, without warning or farewell to family and friends, our debts unpaid, our sorries unsaid. As citizens of San Francisco, we mourned those 63 victims, each death imagined with horror. We put away our stories that paled in comparison, but later brought them out frequently, told with all the drama, and mixed with humor available only with hindsight and the knowledge that the end of the story would always be the same. We made it. We were alive to say what happened.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 02:33:30 +0000