The three of us sat sprawled on the couch like a pile of puppies, and we just talked. Son asked if I'd ever experienced a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a tornado. I told him I hadn't been through either of those, but there was the '89 Loma Prieta quake, which I experience firsthand as a new employee at the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz, which was largely destroyed that day, twenty years ago this October. Then the conversation shifted to the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, where my grandfather lived. He was just a boy right about the age my son is now, and my mother tells me that, shortly after the quake hit, he was running down the street carrying the precious family portrait, since each person basically had time to carry just one thing.
I know time isn't something you can carry in a literal sense. It's fleeting and resistant to any human effort to control it. But I'll tell you this: If time could be carried, if it could be removed from danger and taken elsewhere, that half hour on the couch today would be the kind of thing you'd see clutched in my arms as I ran toward safety.Follow @nicole_mcinnes
