I am born and raised in California.  It is therefore a given that earthquakes have always been part of my reality. I can’t say exactly when I learned about plate tectonics, but I can say that I learned about earthquakes at a young age.

All through grammar school, we practiced our “duck and cover.”  Not for the threat of nuclear attack.  It wasn’t the fifties.  No, our duck and covers were all about earthquakes.  Those safety drills permanently implanted into my brain that at the slightest tremor, you duck under the nearest sturdy table, and if there wasn’t one, you braced yourself in a door jam.  Frankly, as a kid I really couldn’t fathom a door jam being much help in an earthquake.  I’ve always been shorter than average and that supporting beam seemed an awfully long way away from my head to do me much good. 

As a college student, I lived in a small version of the International House.  Most of the residents, unlike me, were foreign graduate students on Fulbright scholarships.  Those of us who were undergraduates and whose ethnicity was white American, we got in by being a member of the Episcopal Church.  It was a two-story Victorian style creaky old place, with several shared kitchens and co-ed bathrooms.  Anyway, it so happened that I was on the second floor in 1984 when the earthquake that brought down my parents’ brick chimney hit.  I was sixty miles away from the epicenter, but I could sure feel it in that wobbly building.  Down I went under the kitchen table.  No one joined me.  They just stared.  I guess none of the other students had had the same rigorous earthquake conditioning that I had gone through as a child.

My next big earthquake memory is from the 1989 Bay Bridge World Series earthquake, more formally known as the Loma Prieta.  Oakland A’s at San Francisco Giants.  The quake hit just as I was pulling into a parking space in front of my sister’s townhouse apartment.  I had left work early in order to be there in time for the first pitch.  I had just turned off the engine when it hit, and I mistook the shaking and the noise for the car backfiring.  Took a moment to realize the enormity of what happened, up to and including major destruction to the Bay Bridge itself.

It is because of that earthquake that I became acquainted with the “Mandela Effect.”  The Mandela Effect, if you have not heard of it, is this strange but surprisingly common phenomenon, in which a whole group of people share a false memory. For me, the false memory was that the earthquake interrupted the very first game of the series, and I would have taken an oath swearing to the truth of the matter.   I nearly got into an argument over that very fact with one of my colleagues, just about twenty years later.  He said it was because of the earthquake that the Giants lost the series in four straight, because the A’s ace pitcher could have a second start after the long rest.  The A’s had already won the first two games, and now their ace could have another start.  This was an older colleague whom I respected, so I wasn’t going to get into an argument with him.  However, I knew in my heart of hearts he was wrong.  I let it slide.  

And then I checked on the Google machine.  He was right.  The Giants had already lost two games by then.  And not only that, I wasn’t the only person on the planet who believed differently.  It is a common misconception that the earthquake cancelled game one, not game three, of the Bay Bridge World Series.

All that shaking can rattle the brain, I guess.

As an aside, it’s too bad the Mandela Effect refers to mass mistaken memory.  I would have wished the Mandela Effect instead referred to the earthshaking force of peaceful resistance against an authoritarian regime.

Just sayin’.