The Aruba in Earthquakes
My first earthquake in 1989
The chandelier swayed first. The two-story walls of the living room twisted. The wooden stairwell creaked. Overlooking the living room from the second-floor balcony, my sister and I giggled. We danced in a circle and shrieked in glee. “Aruba, a tuba, amooba, gooba, let’s go away to amooba,” we sang the misheard words from a 1988 Beach Boys song.
The shaking felt funny, and my sister agreed with me. So we bounced, jumped, and whirled as much as our 6-year-old and 7-year-old selves could.
Then it was still. I don’t recall subsequent details. My mom says she was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She rushed to the living room and called our names. My grandmother, who lived with us, slid down in the bathtub and gripped its edges.
What I do remember is the boxy TV while hugging my favorite stuffed animal to my chest. The screen filled with scrolling black and white dust. Every few seconds, a male voice broke through the noise, and jagged images of the collapsed freeways and buildings skittered across the screen.
The two-story tract house in Hercules, where I lived at the time, was spared. The pots and pans were still. The framed photos remained stationary just as they were yesterday.
But my throat tensed, and my shoulders ached. Sixteen miles away, my father was getting into his car when the lamp poles began to sway. My mom called his office immediately but heard only silence on the line. Not even a ring tone. “I don’t know where he is,” she said and dropped the phone in its cradle.
An hour later, the garage door roared open. Soon, my father stepped into the living room and said, “I am home.”
Twenty-five years later, I have experienced a few more “big ones”. It’s often at night when I am half-awake, dreaming of another land and cursing anything that wakes me up from sleep. I spread like an eagle on my bed, sweeping my arms to the bed corners, confirming that I am alive. The walls of my San Francisco Edwardian apartment tremble, and I hear the hanging lamp swing above me. I pull my feet closer to my chest, remembering not when I was afraid in 1989, but the joy with my sister as we sang about going to Aruba, Jamaica, and Kokomo to get away from it all.
