Friday was the twentieth anniversary of the Northridge Earthquake. Twenty years ago I was woken up by a dream that our house (in Northridge) was being picked up by a tow truck. I can still see this image in my mind as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I called the tow truck a pickup truck for the longest time. (But in defense of 5-year-old me, it was picking up our house. Perfectly logical name.)

I remember earthquake drills — their frequency, how ingrained the routine became, the day that we all put our mandatory first aid kits in the trailer on the far edge of our elementary school campus. I remember the foil blankets most of all because I thought that seemed neat. I know nothing about camping or wilderness so this seemed like a delightful novelty. I wished I could sleep with one of those silver blankets in my actual bed at home.

I was only five, which is old enough to remember things but young enough that it’s patchy. I remember waiting in my dad’s brown Taurus, listening to the radio. I remember caravaning down to the parking lot of Alpha-Beta, the grocery store at the bottom of the hill. (It was a Whole Foods the last time I was in the area.) I’ve already told this story here, but I had an unfortunate peeing-in-the-bushes SNAFU. For weeks after the earthquake I slept in my doorway wearing a football helmet and a backpack filled with first aid supplies and every pair of underwear I owned.

When asked if I was afraid, I would calmly answer, “No, I’m just prepared.”

And truly, I remember nothing fearful about it or the drills. My school told me, “This is how we prepare,” and so I though, “OK. Cool. This is what we do now.” I was five and had imaginary friends; I’d taken to stranger ideas than shiny blankets and sleeping with underwear on your back.

On my first day of high school geometry — my first classroom at my school in Missouri — I was struck by the peculiar way habits had sprung out of that event. I looked around the room and bags were strewn all over the floor. Backpacks in the aisles and under the desks — in the way when you’d need to duck under one, mid-Earthquake. How would we evacuate in case of an emergency? As a kid, backpacks went on the back of our chairs, for safety. That’s just how it was and I stopped thinking about it. It’s funny how second nature those things they become. They’re in your psyche. They are automatic until suddenly you find yourself around people who don’t find them automatic and for the first time ever you really notice it. Suddenly I was the only student in the room hanging her backpack on the back of the chair and it was strange.

And then I got to learn about tornado drills! I remember going into the basement theater — I never seemed to find myself, on those drill days, in the classrooms sent to the art hallway. It seems to me that the art hallway would have kept the greatest number of people safe, though the theater had some better locations for kids who knew and were prepared to throw some elbows. But then, I didn’t really know all that much about tornadoes.

(And yet, I HAD been the tornado expert in elementary school, due to a distant memory of a time, shortly before we left, in which my brother and I had been home with a babysitter when there was a tornado warning. I remember standing on my brother’s bed in the basement, looking out the tiny window near his ceiling. In my childhood retellings of this story, we saw the tornado wipe out the entire other side of the street, but that was bullshit. I justified the lie to myself based on how little I actually remembered. I don’t remember what we saw out that window — probably nothing — and so it seemed reasonable enough to wager that it had been the houses on the other side of the street being blown away, magically sparing our own. The other first graders didn’t question it.)

Much like the new year is a social trigger to make everyone think of renewal and the future and plans, anniversaries have a way of directing our attention backwards. “Remember that?” asks the calendar. It’s funny what floats to the surface. The first thing that occurred to me when I thought, “Northridge Earthquake” was the tow truck dream, followed by my memory of returning to school. My kindergarten teachers, in their quest to help a bunch of five-year-olds process this big thing that happened, placed Band-Aids on the cracks in our classroom walls. I wonder if they had any idea that memory would stick around for twenty years.

The act of reflecting brings new ways to process and contextualize the present. I truly believed that I could wear that backpack and that helmet and that was it. I still sort of feel that way — that there is a short list of necessities, and you work out the rest as you go.

Except I didn’t believe, even then, that bandages would fix cracks in walls. Maybe that’s why I remember it — because I was trying to understand it even then. I think I just liked the idea of it. I still do. I like the symbolism. That you put a bandage on it to say, “Yes, it’s broken, but it will mend. It can be fixed. We’ll get to that in time.”

Things are broken, but they can mend — they can and will be fixed. Give it time.