My father has always been a quiet man.

Not the quiet of someone with nothing to say. The quiet of someone who has decided, at some point in the past, that what he knows is not for everyone to know. That the things he carries are his to carry, not for display, not for conversation, not for the particular transaction where you offer your experience and receive admiration in return.

He had been quiet my whole life.

I was fifty-three years old on the day of the airport and I was still learning the shape of what he had been quiet about.

His name is Thomas Ellison.

He is eighty-one years old.

He has a cane now, which he has had for three years since the hip replacement that left him with a slight drag in his left foot, a drag he manages with the specific dignity of someone who has decided not to let the drag become the story.He is a tall man, still, although not as tall as he was. He had been six-two when I was a child and I had looked up at him the way children look up at things that seem too large to fully comprehend. He is perhaps six feet now, the years having compressed him slightly in the way of tall men in their eighties, but he still has the bearing of the six-two man, still carries himself with the straightness of someone who was taught, early and seriously, what posture communicates.

He would be quiet about the rest.

Because that was who he was.

That was the whole thing.

And it was everything.

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