Seventeen years ago on the 17th...I was shopping with my mom in a department store in Morgan Hill, Ford's Department Store. Morgan Hill is a suberb just south of Santa Clara County. My boyfriend's (at the time) family owned the entire chain of department stores. We lived in Santa Cruz. There was a store in Santa Cruz and the flagship store in Watsonville, along with several other stores along the coast and in the Central Valley. The store started shaking and my mom and I wrapped our arms around each other and got down close to the floor as there was nothing to get under. I remember the Jockey underwear rack falling down right behind my mom and we didn't hear anything. I remember watching the lights pop and fall out of the ceiling and we heard nothing. To this day I cannot explain to you why we heard nothing, because it must have made a lot of noise. I have lived in California since I was three years old. We lived in Santa Clara County which is right on the San Andreas Fault, the biggest, most active fault in California. We had earthquakes all the time. They were fun. Earthquakes are fun when they are 3.5 or so. This really didn't feel a lot different. We walked to the china department after it stopped and we were about three inches deep in the china and crystal on the floor. We went outside. My mom put the top down on her convertible and we all gathered around to listen to the radio as all the power was out in the store. When the radio got to the point of saying the Bay Bridge collapsed, everyone thought we heard it wrong. They said it again, we had heard it right. We knew this was different than any other earthquake we had experienced. My boyfriend and I locked the store up the best we could and started home. We went over Hecker Pass into Watsonville. He had a Volkswagon Cabriolet at the time and we were dodging boulders and just trying to beat the Highway Patrol to Watsonville. The radio had said that Hecker Pass was closed. We needed to get to the other side of the hill, to home, before they really closed the Pass and wouldn't let us through. When we got to the other side of the hill we looked down into Watsonville. It looked like a camp. A lot of people in Watsonville didn't feel safe going back into their homes and they were camping on the high school field, the main park in town and every other grassy area they could find. We looked down at all the campfires, tents and camp lights and knew it was bad in Watsonville. We stopped by his parent's house in Aptos. They had a swimming pool which, they said, had looked like a tsunami when the earthquake hit. Water was everywhere. We got home to our apartment in Santa Cruz and it looked like someone had turned it upside down. Santa Cruz is just fifteen minutes or so away from the epicenter of the earthquake in Loma Prieta. Books were everywhere, everything was off the shelves and the cats were gone. We listened to the radio all night. At about 10:00 a.m. they said there was looting in Santa Cruz. We went downtown to guard the Santa Cruz store. There was one guy who was just about to walk off with a leather jacket when we arrived. We also found out that a woman had died in the dressing room after the building next door fell onto the roof of the store. The entire downtown looked like a war zone. In the days following, we spent our time trying to get to work, clean out the Watsonville store so the wrecking ball could take it down forever and look for our other cat. One of our cats came home shortly after we did. Her stomach ruled her life and she wasn't going to miss a meal, no matter what happened. The other cat didn't come home for four days. For those of you not familiar with Northern California, the Ford's Department Store in Watsonville was the second oldest department store in the state. It was a very sad day when the wrecking ball came as the store had been the center of the community for over a hundred years. My boyfriend's grandfather put his house up for collateral and received a FEMA loan to rebuild the Watsonville store. It opened, with great gala, almost two years to the day after the earthquake. Unfortunately, it was too much for Watsonville. The store would have been more at home in San Francisco and it failed miserably. Today, the Ford's Department Store chain is no longer. I learned that when you live through something like this and when there is so much to do to make everything work, you have no time to grieve, no time to cry. When the Northridge earthquake hit years later, I sat on the couch and cried. I cried all the tears that should have been cried when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit on October 17, 1989.