The Mental Aftershocks Are Slowly Fading

Forget the earthquake.

On a recent evening, Trotsky, the Doyle family’s golden retriever, got hit by a truck.

And though Bart Doyle had been thinking about going to a Red Cross-sponsored seminar on quake stress that night, Trotsky’s mishap quickly overshadowed the June 28 temblor--at least temporarily.

“That’s more disturbing than anything else right now,” Doyle, 41, said of Trotsky’s accident. (Diagnosis: Bruised shoulder.)

Still, Doyle’s wife, Sharon, said the accident “made me realize how upset I was, underneath it all, about the earthquake.

“I said: ‘OK, what’s next?’ It felt so unsafe, and I usually don’t feel that way. I expect something stupid is going to happen, and I am going to burst into tears, and it’s going to be really because of the earthquake.”

The Sierra Madre earthquake--whether in the form of the rubble-filled front yards that Bart sees on his morning constitutional along this town’s tree-lined streets or the earthquake stories that housekeeper and baby-sitter Elizabeth Menendez and her colleagues share when they meet with their young charges in the city park at noon--continues to assert itself in the life of the Doyle family of Baldwin Avenue.

Yet ordinary life is returning for the two parents, three children, one housekeeper and array of pets who inhabit their quake-damaged turn-of-the-century gray wooden house.

For the parents, the days are settling into a summer routine of meetings, appointments and intense work. This is the busy time for Sharon, 43, a television script writer readying material for the coming season. For the children, the schedule includes drama rehearsals, tennis practice, swimming and selling lemonade from a curbside stand.

“This . . . is the return of normalcy,” Sharon said.

But the quake remains an influence in ways both bureaucratic and emotional.

Sharon blames her continuing nightmares on the temblor.

Bart’s nightmare is red tape.

Before work July 15, Bart, a lawyer, went to the opening day of a disaster assistance office set up in Arcadia by the federal Small Business Administration. He picked up the forms needed to apply for a low-interest repair loan.

An SBA officer went through the blue forms with him page by page. List your VISA and MasterCard debt here, he told Doyle, and put CDs and IRAs on these lines.

The forms were straightforward enough, Doyle said, and the program sounded reassuring. But like everything else related to the quake, this was taking another chunk of time.

“We’re sort of hanging fire,” Sharon said recently, explaining they were waiting for insurance company and contractors’ estimates. “You don’t know whether to get broken picture frames fixed. People with $20,000 worth of damage and no insurance are just going out and getting things fixed.”

Word did come, though, from one contractor who estimated repairs to the two-story house at $60,000.

“It seems such an enormous job,” Sharon said. “There’s going to be one day when we start doing it. Now we’re putting it off.”

One day last week, Bart walked through the house and said to Sharon, apropos of quake repairs, “Are we going to do anything today?”

In unison, they quickly concluded: “No, let’s not.”