I Feel The Earth Move

...under my bed, I hear the kitchen utensils clanging around, clanging around.

At 4:52 a.m. Saturday, my first Tokyo tremor shook me from a slumber. A quake registering 4.3 on the Richter scale was no cause for alarm in one of the world's most seismically active regions. At first I wondered who was shaking my bed, only to realize, hey, the whole building was vibrating. No worries. I checked the clock and drifted back to sleep, waking up on my own seven hours later wondering if it had been a dream.

This event surpassed a 4.0 tremor I recall propelling my bath toys into the toilet in suburban New York in 1985. A 5.1 earthquake 130 miles away from Dartmouth rattled campus in 2002, but it occurred early one Saturday morning while I was still under sedation from over-Budweiserification. As long as I'm not in an elevator shaft or a subway carriage, I eagerly await the next plate shift.