At about 6:00 a.m. on February 9th, 1971, I was awakened by the violent shaking of my bed. I jumped up and ran into the kitchen, where I saw my bride’s ceramic trinkets dancing across the top of the refrigerator and dropping onto the floor. Our apartment was rumbling with the force of what I would learn was an earthquake, something that we two had never experienced in our hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On this February day, the movement of two plates of the earth brought down a new hospital building, a freeway overpass, and left the Los Angeles streets littered with shattered glass blown from the windows of high-rise buildings. Months later, when my mother-in-law was visiting with us, the sudden thumping movement of an aftershock shifted the chair she sat in; her eyes widened and she asked, “Did you feel that?”
A TV series that I was watching is based in Los Angeles, California, and a recent episode featured an earthquake. The series’ characters made a joke of asking each other, “Did you feel that?” at every burp of the earth. I chuckled each time they uttered those lines, imagining that thousands of members of their respective neighborhood social media platforms were lighting up their keyboards with the same query. But in 1971, the two Pennsylvania Yankees in the Los Angeles court had neither keyboard nor TV and learned about the cause of the house-shaking experience on the radio.
In 1974, Morris Albert wrote and recorded a song named “Feelings,” a song that was covered by my favorite artist, Walter Jackson, in 1977. The word “feelings” is repeated 23 times in the song, and I think of that song when I hear my youngest daughter telling my granddaughter that it is “OK to have big feelings,” but not OK to scream and kick about them. In the language of the Hip Hop culture, feelings play a part in communication: “You feel me?” means “do you understand me,” or “do you agree with me.” In 2009 the singing group The Black-Eyed Peas released “I Gotta Feeling,” singing that “tonight’s gonna be a good night.” On Thursday, August 19th, I had a good night, having had the privilege of seeing an IndyFringe musical called “Shy.” In it, two strangers share a bench at a bus stop and feel an attraction to each other that neither one can voice. So, they sing about what they feel. Lauren’s description of “big feelings” to my granddaughter Myah could often be applied to me. I was appalled to think that Myah interpreted my growl of frustration about a tangled cord on my mini blinds as anger toward her. Lauren said that I was “leaking” as I told her of the event, wanting to ensure that Myah did not feel badly because of my behavior. My big feelings are often expressed through my tear ducts.
Those big feelings burst out at the end of a movie called The Bear, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, when the whimpering bear cub, pursued by a predator, is saved by its huge Kodiak friend. I also “leaked” (along with this paper’s co-owner, Paula Nicewanger) at the end of Marie’s Story, the movie about a deaf-mute woman who had been taken in by nuns. At the gravesite of the nun who had taught her so much, Marie uses sign language to tell the heavens of her love for the that nun. I could barely read the closed captions through the mist on my eyeballs, and Paula was sniffling and snotting beside me. Neither Paula nor I had to ask:
Did you feel that?
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