As a kid in L.A., it wasn’t odd to experience earthquakes on a somewhat-regular basis, with most of them showing up as tiny temblors. By the time you’d actually figured out why your pencil was rolling across your desk, it had stopped and all of the “action” was over. Nine out of ten earthquakes were processed by my young brain more as possible ghost story than cataclysm.
But every now and again, you’d have something a little bigger roll on through. The kind of earthquake where objects fall off of shelves, sidewalks crack, and there was an audible rumble coming from someplace unidentifiable.