As hard as it would one day be to believe, my parents began their lives together as optimists, even though everyone they loved literally ran from their wedding screaming. I am the least superstitious person on earth, and even I might have taken that as some kind of omen.

When Mom and Dad met at the altar on that gray November Saturday in 1968, they had been dating for two years and decided to stick with one another for life. They were both 23. My mom had been engaged once before, to a police officer, but that relationship’s murky entry into the family history book is simply that it “didn’t work out.” The record is similarly fuzzy on how my parents met, exactly; I do know that my grandparents were notorious drinkers and carousers back in the day, and reading between the lines I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad met because Dad and Grandma used to frequent the same neighborhood bar. (It was a different time.) All the murkiness is probably for the best; how much do any of us really need to know about our parents’ love lives? I’m friends with some of my exes, and occasionally when I’m playing with their kids I think, “If I told you how your parents and I knew one another, your head would explode.” Some things are better left in the past.

The record is window-clear about the wedding, though. Everyone in the family talks about that morning as if they just fled the church a minute ago.

As planned, the whole thing was to be an unspectacular affair, just the standard Catholic ceremony at the neighborhood parish (Holy Name, which sounds less like the name of a church than a placeholder until someone could think of a cool saint) followed by the standard pot luck at the neighborhood VFW hall. Everything went according to plan until about 11:00; the young priest said his words, the couple said their vows, and then they went to lay some flowers at the feet of a statue of Mary. Mom had just placed the flowers and started to kneel when suddenly she felt her knees shaking.

“Why would my knees be shaking?” she thought. “I’m not nervous.” Mom is very hard to impress, and the thought of being nervous about something like marrying my dad would have been ridiculous. It was then that she realized she wasn’t shaking; everything else was. That was when the plaster started falling.

The papers the next morning would say the earthquake measured a 5.5 on the Richter scale, nothing to get excited about on the West Coast but something akin to the apocalypse for Midwesterners whose town hadn’t so much as twitched in almost 100 years. At the site of the plaster crumbling, everyone in attendance lost their minds and began climbing over one another to escape. The sanctity of the event went right out the stained glass window; if anybody in the church was thinking about God, they were thinking that He was scary when He was mad and they’d better get out of His house. When it was all over, the priest would make Mom and Dad go back into the church to finish the ceremony and walk down the aisle “officially”; not a single wedding guest would go back into the church with them.

The thing that always stuck with me was that, when the earth moved, my mother and grandmother both froze. Grandpa took a second to evaluate his chances and left Grandma standing right where she was, bolting for the door; some people remember him at least pausing to yell at her to run. My dad heard the rumble and immediately took Mom in his arms and ushered her out the side door to safety. I have often wondered, as they got older and more tired of one another, whether my mom or dad ever looked at one another in the middle of an argument and thought about that moment. When you go to God’s house and ask Him to bless your union, and He responds with an earthquake, it’s hard not to take that as a bad sign. But maybe Mom saw the way Dad cared for her when everything around them was trembling and decided it was a pretty good omen after all.