He saw Dr. Rosenblatt’s white sign hanging from its wrought iron stand in front of his pleasant little house. Did Dr. Rosenblatt know the neighborhood was changing? It cannot be said for sure and he can’t be interviewed because Dr. Rosenblatt died in Florida in 1963 before he had finished Jonathan’s teeth. As a sidebar, it should also be mentioned that a chubby, middle-aged man had no business out on a lake on a wooden float in Florida when he should have expected that if he had had a heart attack he couldn’t possibly get back to shore, but that’s life, or death if you will. What was he going to do? Swim ashore with a heart attack? Stupid. Perhaps the future seemed like a dream to him. In any event, one thing is clear. He must not have thought about Jonathan’s teeth when he had the attack. He must have been thinking about something else. Maybe it was: "Is that all there is to life. We dreamers always think that when we’re about to die.

 At 9:25 and fifteen seconds, Jonathan was crossing the street toward the library. He nearly swooned at the curve of Caton Avenue. What luxury! One could see all the way up to Linden and down to Flatbush without any strain at all. I’d like to describe the street for the benefit of those who did not grow up in Flatbush. It was exactly forty-one seconds wide for Mrs. Grossbart when she was pushing her shopping cart in front of her and assuming one snag where gravity or centripetal force would push the little crossmember on the front of the cart down and the rubber feet (rubbed raw at the bottom) would get stuck on a slight rise in the street. She would have been better to pull the cart behind her but you know women. Maybe it was a strength thing. Maybe Mrs. Grossbart had arthritis and couldn’t pull the wagon. You know the arthritis; it was crippling. You wouldn’t expect her son to come and take her shopping. "She’s got the cart! And she likes her independence. You can’t take her away from that neighborhood! She loves it and she has all her friends there! If we brought her here, what would she do? She’d be alone all day rattling around in an empty house. You know that Jennifer and I both work. She’s better where she is."

 Jonathan headed for the Golden adventure books in the library. They were up on the high shelf by the window nearest Flatbush Avenue. He couldn’t understand why they would be up there, apart from all the other books.

 By now, the subterranean rumblings had become profound if you could have been three hundred and fifty miles below the surface of Caton Avenue. Rock, midway between molten and solid was grinding against other rock and a fissure had grown toward the surface until it was practically just below their feet. Maybe the epicenter was up towards the Ebbett’s Field apartments. That was a place that deserved an earthquake. Did anybody really care that their apartment stood on top of third base? Like building a house on a cemetery.

 The Brooklyn Museum stands by itself in a part of Brooklyn that is near the Grand Army Plaza right at the entrance to the other Flatbush Avenue— the one that runs straight to the Manhattan Bridge. Jonathan had only a faint idea of the general arrangement of things and the earthquake couldn’t have cared less.

 Did I mention that the Super was black? I mean very, very dark brown so that when he got hurt, like caught on a nail, the wound was lighter than his skin instead of the other way around. Was it squalor that he lived in? I couldn’t say. But they had a nice TV. And the piles of clothes that we used to sit on were so soft and smelled so sweetly that the Super’s wife must have been a lovely sort of lady. There weren’t any real walls down there so how could anyone put a tv down there? Actually, they had an apartment. So what were they doing down there anyway? It must have been the porter.

 The fish in the appetizing store hung in the window and not one showed any signs of being aware that an earthquake was coming. It’s said that animals are the first to tell when a catastrophe is about to happen, having some innate sensitivity to vibrations or to variations in the magnetic field, but those fish were plain dumb to the danger. Jonathan often wondered how they managed to get all gold colored like they were. Gefilte fish and herring were available in the appetizing store but Jonathan did not find them appetizing. Humor serves no purpose in an earthquake.

 You may wonder what Mrs. Goldstein was doing while Jonathan was walking headlong into danger and calamity. She wasn’t home. Her attitude, the prevailing one in the house, held that a boy of ten was perfectly safe to go wandering around the neighborhood as long as he was careful and he didn’t talk to strangers. It couldn’t be held against her if her son stumbled into a totally unpredictable natural disaster. Who would be so foolish as to suggest the likelihood of a seismic event of epic proportions in New York, especially in those years? You couldn’t even get insurance for an earthquake in Brooklyn; actuaries were insensitive to the risk.

 The Loew’s (pronounced LOW-eez) Kings was a magnificent, art deco temple that sat just past Erasmus Hall High School. When the Falafel place opened up next to it Jonathan’s mother had some hope that the neighborhood would stay Jewish. Fat chance. Jews are as skittish as house flies. There was another theater just past the Kings and then the Albemarle and the Rialto. In the other direction there were two more theaters but that neighborhood was different. That’s where the A&P was with the gentile girl, Ann Parker on all the bread wrappers. Sometimes, Jonathan would get up the courage to go to that A&P to buy the vanilla/chocolate cake with sugar icing he loved but he never felt comfortable there getting out as soon as he could. He half expected to get scolded by an incarnation of the wrapper girl. Some five-foot eight inch, furious, German, gentile girl with pigtails who would come running out of the back when she saw him screaming at him in a slight German accent to go back to Bohack’s where he belonged. There was also a Bowling Alley but it was one of those underground affairs with a tiny sign hanging out over the sidewalk. The pin-setters weren’t the new AMF jobs that would show you what pins were still standing and lit up the big "X" when you got a strike. The lanes were old and irregular and the place smelled like beer.

 Mrs. Goldstein claimed, although you may already have a taste for the value you can place on any of Mrs. Goldstein’s assertions, that she had bowled with Jonathan’s father. Hardly a dry eye in the house after that one. Hysterical peals of laughter might follow such a claim had anyone the self-confidence to laugh directly at Mrs. Goldstein. The idea of Mrs. Goldstein hurling a large, heavy ball down an alley defies imagination. Now Mr. Goldstein might have done it when he was still alive. Unfortunately, he died in 1948, two years before Jonathan’s birth, when he was thwarted in an attempt to abandon the marital domicile following a dispute centering on the subject of infidelity, by a misplaced coffee table situated unexpectedly two inches to the right of where it had been only hours before. His brother and sister began mourning directly after they learned of his misfortune and continued unceasingly until his funeral in the spring of 1988.

I don’t know when people started to move out of the neighborhood. Maybe it was before Jonathan was born but by 1960 it was well along. Jews are as skittish as mice. The effects of an earthquake are far reaching: extensive relocations, disjoined families, confusion, destabilization of the community, shattering of the public confidence.

 When Jonathan left the library, it was 9:58 and nine seconds. He crossed the street to look in the side window of Sutter’s bakery. Jonathan watched the Sutter’s baker make roses out of butter cream for ten minutes. Powdered sugar is about all some people can remember about Sutter’s but it was a long time ago. Jonathan’s grandmother liked Sutter’s because it was expensive and fine. That meant that the hoi polloi couldn’t buy their cakes there which gave the place a vital cach¾ in her estimation. There’s a point system for humanity; you get points for class, breeding and culture but you get points taken away for wanton arrogance, excessive pride and condescension without pity or understanding. Grandma accumulated a lot of deductions. It all came even in the end, though, although it seldom does. She died quite mad sitting up waiting for Jesus to scale the outer wall of her apartment building.

 Let me tell you some interesting facts about Jonathan. He was said to be a promising young piano student. By whom is lost to time and poor record-keeping. He had a good ability to concentrate and he liked the precision of musical rhythm and even the articulate notation system but he didn’t love the music enough to be passionate. When the man from the music school came, he wasn’t interested in Jonathan although he showed some interest in Mrs. Goldstein. Jonathan was relieved, but how bitter a taste to lack talent. Continuous digressions are not important in earthquake season.

 Another day Jonathan got up to find a stranger sitting in their living room. Mr. Fontis smiled at Jonathan and said "and how are you young man?" Mrs. Goldstein looked at Jonathan with a smile. "Fine, thank you," was all he could think to say. "Mr. Fontis works for General Electric, Jonny," his mother said.

"Big deal," he thought but just nodded.

"I was showing your mother a vacuum cleaner."

As if Jonathan was interested in such facts.

"Do you like this one Belle? It has very nice features."

"Oh, it’s very nice," she flirted.

"I can get you one, you know. I will. I’ll get you one and bring it over on Thursday. Will you be home on Thursday?"

Mr. Fontis smiled a deranged, toothy grin which failed to repulse Mrs. Goldstein.

"Yes, I’ll be here," she said demurely. It should be noted that If you ever saw Mrs. Goldstein say something demurely you’d choke on your own astonishment.

 Thursday, Mr. Fontis brought the vacuum and received whatever compensation Mrs. Goldstein had decided to pay. I doubt he got sex. She wouldn’t sell out to a man with a deranged grin for a crummy vacuum. It’s hard to estimate just how much dust that vacuum picked up. It lasted for years. They kept it in the linen closet and it fit in quite nicely although you had to completely disassemble the metal tube which came in three sections to get it in. Jonathan always thought it was a little odd every time he saw his father using that vacuum, considering its source. Jonathan wasn’t around to hear the explanation his mother had offered his father for how she got the vacuum. Maybe she said it was a gift.

 On the subject of the linen closet, I ought to mention that it always smelled of Yardley’s Old English Lavender Soap, Mrs. Goldstein’s favorite. Jonathan bought it for her on Mothers’ Days because she liked it and he could save up enough by May to get her a three-bar set. It is not altogether unappealing to associate clean linen with lavender. If one had such an association it would stay with them for life and probably never be cause for alarm or repugnance. Maybe happiness is simply a surplus of similarly pleasant associations. Anyway, there must be clean linen and lavender in heaven.

 The earthquake hardly mattered to anyone on Flatbush Avenue. At the barber shop, Harry was still cutting high pompadours out of children’s hair and then soaking them with a thick, green, hair treatment that he bottled from a huge vat and sold to unsuspecting parents at a substantial profit. The treatment was so effective that, even through an earthquake, kids’ hair could be expected to stay exactly the way Harry had combed it. If a kid had the green treatment in his hair you could pick up all the hair on the top of his head just by lifting one strand; it would all come up like a leaf—it was a volume of hair having gone from plural to singular.

 Down Flatbush Avenue several blocks, the earthquake hardly mattered to anyone at the Ped-I-form shoe store. Children were still waiting for the man to come out from the back with their new shoes after making a slight adjustment. At, Macy’s the escalator did not stop running and none of the pretty sales girls got runs in their stockings. At the Automat, none of the little windows got stuck and none of the plates fell out the back onto the serving ladies. At Art-Hy’s, Art didn’t die quietly with his family watching, and Art’s family didn’t sell out to Rosen, and they didn’t change the name to Hy-Rosen. At the Lipschitz’s grocery store, the pretty daughter didn’t stop having a fantasy about the boy who wasn’t orthodox who happened to stumble into the store on a rainy Saturday. She didn’t stop dreaming about kissing him and melting passionately into his strong arms. She didn’t stop imagining her father catching them while they were still kissing and becoming enraged and yelling at them. She didn’t stop dreaming that the boy just looked at her father, not letting her go, still holding her in a liquid embrace. She still heard the boy’s disdainful laugh and saw how her father blushed with rage. She imagined that she might also laugh. It was as if no earthquake had happened.

 As Jonathan approached the corner he stubbed his toe on the vertex. The earth began to rumble in a way he had never heard before. It was 10:02 and 3 seconds. People all around him began to shake and jitter step. Jonathan had all he could do to stay on his feet. He looked around the street to see what was happening. He tried to get his bearings. A dog with a wild look caught his eye, stuck at the end of a leash held by a silly-looking woman who appeared confused. She didn’t have anything to hold onto, her body rocking forwards and back in sympathy with the undulations of the ground; her hat kept falling off. She looked like she was dancing.

 At that exact moment the Fox Theater, which was down well past the A&P in the direction of the Brooklyn Museum, came unhinged and began to roll down Flatbush Avenue directly toward Jonathan. Only five years earlier Lewis and Martin had done eighteen shows a weekend there. Frank Sinatra crowds had reluctantly dispersed barely five years before that. Despite this, the entire theater became a mass of moving rubble indifferent to memory. It made an awful aching sound as it gathered speed rolling down the center of Flatbush Avenue. It rolled up the streetcar tracks as it moved southeastward reaching down below the new layer of asphalt to tear them up. Its object can only be guessed at. It coiled up the streetcar tracks and kept moving. You would have thought that the traffic light posts would have stopped it but they didn’t. You would have guessed that the wires across the avenue would have tangled up the whole mass and slowed it down but quite the contrary; it accelerated defying known laws of time and space.

 By the time the Fox Theater rubble pile reached Jonathan, he had made his way over to Sutter’s front windows. It would have been an awful loss if the huge, rolling pile had hit Sutter’s but the elegant bakery would be spared. It was swept away in a later storm but I’m unable to tell that story. For those of you looking to place this quake in your common history, this is the one that killed Art from the malt shop. The one on the corner of Church and Bedford where Jonathon first heard ‘Hernandos’ hideaway’ and faintly wondered about the mysteries of puberty. Culture comes to us all. Art was in his new home in Hewlett. Wife number two, which is what his whole family called Norma the golddigger who wanted his money and didn’t think too hard about the effect her marrying him would have on his children, was sitting on the edge of her bed and she had a contented grin on her face. It wasn’t that she was glad to have the money and be free of him. He was a sweet man and she enjoyed his company. Sex could have been better but she never held that against him. At least he wasn’t fat. If she’d had to grab hold of huge folds of fat it might have bothered her but he was mercifully thin. The single thing that ever bothered her was the ugly liver spot on his forehead. That she could not be happy about. Now he was dying. She hadn’t wished it and she wouldn’t have minded if he’d gone on but he was slipping; the Doctor had not equivocated. They were all in the living room waiting for her. She would let them drive her to the hospital. None of them would say anything about the money but she knew they were looking around the house at the furnishings calculating their value.

 The pile of rubble crushed 358 automobiles between its origin and its ultimate destination which was a small clam restaurant on Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay. Murray’s car was not among the destroyed vehicles although Jonathan, in his less charitable moments, would have wished otherwise. Murray had miraculously turned onto Lincoln Road a second before the rubble reached him, thinking Bedford would be faster than Flatbush. Jonathan now would be stuck with him until 1978 when Murray would finally succumb to lung cancer that was even now growing ever so slowly in his aereoli. Of course, the other problem with Murray not getting flattened by the Fox Theater was that Jonathan would have to drive a woman named Gloria to the funeral—and for that trip there was no forgiveness.

 The appearance of Flatbush Avenue changed only slightly immediately after the quake. It was as if the rubble pile had simply not passed that way. There were no fault cracks in the road surface, no buildings were displaced. It is sometimes said that an earthquake’s real victims lie just below the surface. The day after the quake, the Cohns bought a house in Forest Hills. Mitzi was a painter and she finally would have her studio. Carl was an opthamologist and he would open an office in the basement. "Honey, Herb Edelstein got mugged on his way to Kings County. It’s down the street from his house for God’s sake!" Jews are as skittish as futures investors. A few months later, the doo-wop groups abandoned forever the hopelessly decaying, gothic, arched facade of Erasmus Hall High School. The sounds of their singing no longer echoed from the darkness as you walked by. The arches would be used for other things in later times; never again for singing.

 There were still bright times. Like the weekly, poker games in Jonathan’s kitchen after his mother had gone to work—although waiting on the roof for Murray and his mother to leave had had its drawbacks. And the night the lights went out in 1965. There was, in that event, to the eye of a person half way in the adult world and halfway in a child’s, a very satisfying amount of confusion and unpredictability—an unexpected and valuable lesson in the surprise and wonder of uncertainty.

 Still the inexorable decline continued. Jonathon’s friend Stanley’s house across the street imploded gradually. At the last moment, Jonathan reached his hand into the ruin but Stanley only mocked him from the rubble. Jonathan pretended not to notice. Many of the houses became unlivable as their foundations were weakened by the unstable earth. Lenny and Jay and Harry left. Bruce left also but his mother stayed. But she wouldn’t open the door.

"Mrs. Maxter, it’s Jonathan Goldstein. I used to play with Bruce."

"Goldstein? Oh, yeah, Jonathan. I remember you."

Jonathan stared at the door expecting it to open. He had sat with Bruce in his living room many nights and watched the Red Skelton show. His mother had made them cookies.

"Mrs. Maxter. I just wanted to know how Bruce was doing."

He looked around the hallway trying to see what Mrs. Maxter was so afraid of.

"Oh, he’s fine," the door said. "He lives in Schenectady with his girlfriend."

He stared at the door. He wanted to tell her that he would have liked to look around her apartment one more time and see the furniture.

"OK, thanks, Mrs. Maxter. When you see him, tell him I came by."

He didn’t ask for Bruce’s number. It couldn’t have passed through the locked door.