We were on the Malibu Pier eating the best cinnamon roll of our lives when the 4th of July earthquake wobbled the damn thing. The employees ran out and looked over the edge into the water, so we knew it wasn't a usual movement from the waves or anything. I had once read a book about how Survivors are those who recognize danger and don't remain in status quo when things go wrong, if they can help it, so my girlfriend Siobhan told me to grab some to-go boxes and we hurried off to some nearby rocks on the shore to finish our food.
In one of the boxes we had piled both our plates high into it and in the other was our cinnamon roll. She had woken up that morning wanting a cinnamon roll and there on that pier and then in that box, was their last one. A splendid cinnamon roll. It had, the cinnamon roll, like a salted caramel cream cheese topping and the bun was still warm when we bit back into it on the shore.
I remember the 1994 Northridge Quake, I was a Southern California kid who'd already experienced a few of them, so as I went flying up and down in my bed, I remembered thinking "I hope I remember to tell my parents about this in the morning" but they came running down the hallway to share the experience right then and there. They were still married running across a long hallway, that long pier where my girlfriend and I now ran, to our cinnamon roll, my parents to their kids. We went outside, my sister had friends sleeping over because of the Monday holiday, all of us in our sleeping shirts standing on the grass staring up at the stars, aftershocks, it feeling foreign and devastating and exciting.
We spent this 4th of July with my friend Morgan and his wife and their new baby and his family on their beach, laying there and bodysurfing, ash from last years' Malibu wildfires drifting among us in snaking clumps of debris atop the green water, a riptide nagging at us here and there, smiling, a bunch of smiling wet faces we all were. I felt happy, I felt disoriented, I felt like a kid who'd just been in an earthquake.
