Memory of an earthquake.

"A dream might have taken root in San Francisco's Tenderloin on Saturday when city work crews and neighborhood volunteers planted 77 trees along some of the grittiest streets in the city."

Link.

Ah, the 'Loin...

I had a studio (with a Murphy Bed) in the Tenderloin at 415 Jones Street (#505) when I first moved to San Francisco in 1989. I was nineteen years old. My friend K helped me paint Van Gogh's Starry Night on ceiling and DeChirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street on the foyer wall. I lived next door to a hunky art student w/ bleach blond hair who who rode a BMW motorcycle and painted his whole apartment black.

I was there when the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck just after I poured myself a glass of milk to go with a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. It was the day before my birthday and also the day before my neurology mid-term. I never took that mid-term because the earthquake shut down school for a week. I sipped my milk as the building rocked, and thought to myself, "This is a bad one. Or maybe it's just this old building." After all, I was on the fifth floor. When the shaking stopped, I resumed reading about Lynn Margulis in a Smithsonian Magazine I picked up at the recycling center where I worked.

Then the power went out.

I couldn't very well study without power so I thought about going to a movie. (That tells you what kind of student I was!) The Castro Theater was showing Kubrick that night. I'd missed the 4 p.m. screening of 2001, but I could hustle to make it to the 7 p.m. screening of Dr. Strangelove, which I'd never seen. I invited my other neighbor, a tall, teutonic beauty named Diana to go with me. She informed me the Bay Bridge had fallen down, the city was on fire, looters were looting, etc., etc. "So, that's a no?"

My dad got me on the phone at 3 a.m., worried sick. He reminded me it wasn't the first quake that killed all those people in Mexico City, it was the aftershocks. The first one just loosened all the bricks. The aftershocks brought all the buildings down.

Thanks, Dad.