On Earthquakes and Memories

We had a small earthquake yesterday. The epicenter was near Lebanon, N.J., in a rural area about thirty miles west of here. When the rumbling began, I was not fully awake, and my first thought was that it might be another spring project by neighbors. The aftershock, which came eight hours later at 6 pm, found me very awake, amidst work. It reminded me of distant thunder, and a powerful wind, mixed up with the sort of far-off noise that one hears, but cannot quite name. Each episode lasted about 20 seconds, and while there was no damage here, I understand that a few buildings have been condemned in Newark.

Earthquakes are a rare experience here in the Northeast, and I’ve never experienced one anywhere else. I remember one that happened while I was in grade school, around the age of six or seven. I was visiting my grandmother, then in her 70s, in New Rochelle. My grandmother had a special affinity for folding items — metal tray tables, wooden chairs, even a writing desk — which may not have been related to her compact living space. I remember the sound of the feet of those foldables tapping against the parquet floor, like chattering teeth. Afterwards, all of her framed pictures and mirrors were crooked, and I followed her around the rooms as she straightened them, judging their plumbness from a sufficient distance.

Later, when I was nine, I was watching the World Series when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck on television. I don’t remember much about the game, except that it was being played between San Francisco and Oakland, and it stopped. I was still assiduously trying to develop a love for baseball. But the game itself left no memory. Instead, I remember learning, over the next few days, about the news, the geography, the science: the collapsed freeway and terrifying images of cars that had been crushed beneath; maps of San Francisco, where I had never been, but which reminded me of New York with its many highways and waterfronts; learning about the Richter scale and seismology.

Sometimes I wish that my oldest memories were more readily accessible, but it often seems like the minutiae of recent years has covered the less salient ones like so many layers of dust. Evidently, though, unusual occurrences can elicit particular memories with which they share a thread, including surprisingly clear recollections of experiences long dormant: the sound of rattling wood, the wrongness of crooked mirrors, the intergenerational bond of a small housekeeping task from an otherwise forgotten day in the late 1980s. Then, too, scenes of destruction in a faraway city, and the imperfect comfort to be found in the search for knowledge — even, or perhaps especially, about events that may not offer any satisfying explanation.