January 17th

To paraphrase a Beatles lyric, it was 25 years ago today.  And yes, five years ago today I used that lyric in a blog that began on the same topic; the 1/17/1994 Northridge Earthquake.

It was a Monday.  The Monday of a three-day weekend as Martin Luther King, Jr's Birthday was being observed.  I had deliberately stayed up late the night before so for once I would sleep in on a holiday.  Instead I was awakened by the shaking of the building and my beloved dog Scooter going nuts.  

I described the damage I saw in my office at that private school in Santa Monica in that earlier blog.  What I didn't mention in it was an instance of karma that came from that morning's tremblor.  My divorce from ex-wife #2 had become final weeks earlier.  One of the few things we had argued over was the good china.

She had owned two complete settings of this line of fine china.  We registered for the remaining eight needed to complete the set.  My side of the family purchased almost all of them as wedding gifts.  I argued that given how we were dividing up things that we'd received of wedding gifts, those six settings belonged to me.  She vehemently disagreed.  She ended up conceding other things to get me to give her the dishes.

The funny thing is that the Northridge quake rendered the argument over those dishes meaningless.  Had they been in my apartment in El Segundo, they would have been fine.  Instead they were at the ex-wife's residence in Northridge, where they were all destroyed.  Every single item.

Justice through the intervention of Mother Nature?  No.  Just karma.