Five Years Ago Today...

Five years ago today I was sitting in front of the TV with my dad watching the 9/11 newscasts. All I can remember other than the sight of the towers coming down was the fact that for once he had nothing to say; for once in the 22 years I had known him, my dad was quiet. No complaining. No old-man commentary. He just sat and stared with this look of utter disbelief on his face. He'd seen war and hard work and a lifetime of trying to keep his family afloat with little regard to his own well-being, all the while peppering the days with his sometimes inappropriate, most times spot-on opinions of life and god and the neighbors. But this time, that particular morning, he was silence and reverance and, somewhere deep down, seething anger at the audacity of others. I'm 99.9% sure that that's not how he would have put it, tho. He'd probably have said something more along the lines of "Mother****ers" or some extrememly racist reference to an entire group of people's head-gear, but this was my link to the reality going on 2,000 miles away. This is what made images on a dusty TV screen real - the silence of an opinionated, out-spoken old man stunned into complacency by humanity's capacity for evil.