It's a Tragedy

My friend worked for a news writing wire service that would pick up stories from small towns and share them nationally with newspapers. That way the newspapers could run stories from all over the country without having reporters all over the place. My friend would regularly bring home newspapers from small upstate places, and one of them was run by a kid we'd gone to journalism school with. The kid was the only newspaper employee besides the ad sellers, so he'd write all the stories and editorials. I'll never forget the story he wrote the day after a terrible tragedy. I hadn't laughed in a while, and his story began, "The silence was literally deafening." As in, it was so quiet that people were literally going deaf. I still laugh occasionally when I think about it, and I'm sure my old classmate has no idea how much joy he's brought me.