1989 Quake

It is 1989 and I am finishing up a work day before going home to watch game three of the world series. At the time I’ve been working as a profession for about nine months and then like now work was very important to me. But so were the Giants and they were in a 2-0 hole against the A’s.

The building started to move, an unnatural sway that was from mother nature, and I recognized it as an earthquake. The swaying went on for a long time so I knew it was a big one, likely far away. I called my fiancee, Mimi, who was working across the street in another building. She answered the phone and then pulled the headset back under the desk with her.

My memory skips forward to being in my dingy one bedroom apartment at about the time the game was about to start; maybe 20 minutes later. The apartment still had no power and that’s when it dawned on me that there would be no world series game that night.

We headed out along Concord Ave for a walk, not something we normally did after work. I guess we were looking for supplies or damage or just to see that everyone was ok.  We felt a strong aftershock or two. I don’t remember being scared when I was with her.

I want to say we used our new camping stove to cook dinner. Mimi was eating then and I wished could remember what we ate. There were no mobile phones or internet to figure out what was going on. Maybe I had a battery powered radio. Later that night or the next day we got reports of the marina district fires, the bay bridge collapse, and the cypress freeway collapse. The latter being the most devastating. Overall we felt the it wasn’t that bad and damage was isolated and that the press was overplaying it.

But then again, we were four months into the love. A love that would last forever but not be completed for one never knows when the ground might shake.