So, when I woke up and saw that the top story on the news was the earthquake outside of Chicago, of course I called Mom and Dad to make sure they were all right.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, we didn’t really get any of the ‘blizzard’.”
“What are you talking about? You had a blizzard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The earthquake.”
“What earthquake?”
“The earthquake y’all had last night.”
“Betsy, I just turned the news off after the top stories and they didn’t mention an earthquake. I’ll go look for some damage if you want, but it doesn’t even look like the cat’s rattled.”
(Though I have met their cat and I think it always seems a little rattled.)
So, there you go.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Where do your parents live, B?
I was half-awake in the basement bedroom, and I felt the bed trembling. At first I thought it was a truck going down the street, but it didn’t have the accompanying engine sound and Doppler-whatever. The experience was subtle, but unmistakable. As I recall, I didn’t think anything of it until my sister told me later that there had been an earthquake. At first I thought “cool. I felt an earthquake,” but then I thought about Haiti and it wasn’t so cool.
My sister cracked me up: she said something like “let this be a warning to us.” And I said, “sure, so I’ll move to CA or FL where they don’t have natural disasters.” And my friend Dieter says I can move to Wyoming if I don’t mind the astronomical suicide rate.
They’re down in Bradley, but they felt the last earthquake, so even though this one was epicentered out west of the city, I still had to check. Dad said that they knew the last one was coming and had happened because the cat was acting squirrely before hand and then “rattled” afterwards. I laugh, but then they say animals seem to be able to tell.
The thing that cracked me up about your sister is that you never can tell what these kinds of things are a warning about–don’t be too sure a major catastrophe can’t happen there? Don’t bet against the Cubs? Eat more cake while you still have time? Who knows?
I hope it’s an admonition for cake, but I doubt I could get that lucky.
It better not be a warning that the Cubs are gonna win anything.
Signed,
A Cardinals Fan
More seriously, I worry that growing up in St. Louis has desensitized me to the importance and danger of earthquakes. Because we had so many of them, which were all so small. So I’m not sure that even if I had a cat freaking out to warn me, I would do the right things to be safe in case it was a big quake.
In Bloomington I felt the earthquake, which woke me up (but I’m a light sleeper). I woke up disoriented, feeling the room shake, thinking, “hey, this feels like a mild version of the earthquake we had in 2008; is it one?” Then I went back to sleep.
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