When I was seven months old, I was nearly crushed to death by architecture. If that sounds dramatic, good. It should. No one really expects a hotel lobby to come down like the wrath of God, but there we were, parked in a U-Haul out front, my dad looking for a luggage cart, my mother clutching me like a wriggling purse, and somewhere inside that building, a hundred people were about to die because someone used the wrong bolts.

My dad spent his life as a military consultant, a job so secretive that even I wasn’t allowed to ask for details. He brushed off questions with cryptic phrases like “classified assignment” or “strategic relocation.” Whenever I asked if he was a spy, he’d only respond, “Don’t ask dumb questions,” and shut me down. This career meant we were always on the move, sometimes with less notice than I’d like.

That summer, in 1981, we were in the middle of one of those moves. This time from New York to California. We stopped in a handful of states, passing through Ohio and Missouri. Our plan was to eventually settle in Los Angeles, but first, we had to get through the moving process. The first night out of New York, we stayed in a motel in Columbus, Ohio. My mom swore the bed made her itch and the room smelled like expired lemon-scented cleaner.

The next day, we pulled into Kansas City and checked into the Hyatt Regency downtown. The hotel was impressive, at least to my mom, who was in charge of finding “nice places” on the road. She had an odd affection for indoor fountains and promised my dad there’d be a restaurant shaped like a spaceship.

That night, the hotel was hosting something called a “Tea Dance.” According to my mom, it was a gathering for local businessmen and socialites who still wore polyester with pride and drank cocktails out of tiny glasses with umbrellas. Picture the kind of event where middle-aged men sway awkwardly to swing music while women in pastel dresses watch them with bemused smiles.

We’d just checked into our room when it happened. My mom told me later she heard a strange noise, like a deep, metallic groan, followed by a sound like the world cracking in half. Then came the screams.

It was the moment the fourth-floor suspended walkway snapped from its supports and fell onto the second-floor walkway, which was also crowded. Both walkways collapsed onto the lobby below. Steel, concrete, and bodies came crashing down in a twisted heap of destruction.

My dad says he heard the crash and immediately grabbed me and my mom. They were evacuated from the hotel, sent back to the U-Haul. My mom remembers the dust. The choking cloud that filled the air and settled into every corner. She says she held me close and prayed we wouldn’t be next.

The next morning, the news announced the disaster: over a hundred people dead, more than two hundred injured. The cause was traced back to an engineering failure. Someone had changed the original design plans and used inadequate support rods. The kind of mistake you make when you want to save a buck and ignore safety codes. The resulting collapse was the deadliest structural failure in U.S. history.

I don’t remember any of this. I was seven months old, after all. But my parents never forgot.

My mom told me about the moments just before the collapse, when the hotel was full of life. The atrium where the dance was held was like a giant greenhouse. Four stories high, bathed in natural light, with suspended walkways crossing above like giant catwalks.

People wore suits and ties, slacks and shoulder pads. They mingled, danced, and laughed, oblivious to the danger looming above.

She remembers a woman named Charlotte, a secretary from a nearby law firm who had come with friends to celebrate a promotion. Charlotte’s laughter had been infectious, her eyes bright with excitement.

Then, the noise started.

Some people thought it was a prank – someone dropping something heavy. But then the metal creaked, twisted, and gave way.

Charlotte was on the second-floor walkway.

She never made it down.

In the chaos that followed, emergency workers arrived swiftly. The hotel’s emergency response was swift but overwhelmed. There were bodies to carry, people to comfort, terrified witnesses to reassure.

My parents later said that the hotel felt like a war zone, the way the polished marble was stained with blood and dust, the way the broken glass glittered like sinister confetti.

It was a tragedy that shaped my family’s future in ways I couldn’t understand at the time.

The days after the collapse were a blur of motion and exhaustion. We kept driving west, each mile pushing us further from the horror.

Our new home was an unassuming apartment in Victor Heights, a neighborhood squeezed between the winding freeways of the 110 and 101 interchange. The building was old and crusty, with cracked stucco walls and a courtyard filled with cigarette butts and wilted plants. From the kitchen window, you could see the tip of Dodger Stadium if you leaned out far enough.

It wasn’t much, but it didn’t try to kill us.

Years later, I’d watch documentaries about the collapse, pausing over each frame to look for something familiar. A suitcase. A shadow. A family like mine who didn’t make it out.

And yet, somehow, we survived.

Just barely.

When I think about luck, I think about that night in Kansas City. How close we came to being another statistic. How a misplaced bolt or an overlooked detail can decide who lives and who dies.

It’s a quiet kind of luck. Not a winning lottery ticket or a Hollywood plot twist. Just enough to keep you one step ahead of the falling floor.