Every morning when I go to the studio around 7 AM, I chat with the security guard at the building entrance and the building’s maintenance manager who is often at job that early as well. Both of them are my good chat-buddies, I can say. Today, as usual, I ran into the maintenance manager again. He took the same elevator as me. Normally, we just joke around about random stuff, chuckle a while, and say our goodbyes. Today, something different happened. He dropped his cell phone by accident and leaned over to pick it up. When he did that, his locket slipped out of his shirt and hung outside; It had a picture of a young soldier.

“Your son?” I asked expecting a proud look on his face.

Instead, his eyes that I’ve always seen laughing turned dark and brooding.With the same grim expression, he pointed towards the roof of the elevator.

“With God?” I tried to speak his words for him.

He nodded. I’d never seen him quiet before.

“Where …?” (‘Where did it happen?’ is what I meant to ask but I couldn’t find the words myself.)

He didn’t understand my question. “Yes, with God,” he replied in a voice that couldn’t resist choking up.

“Yes, I am sorry … but where did it happen? Iraq?” I said as softly as I could.

“Yes”, came an almost inaudible reply.

I had no words after that.

It was he who smiled at me first. I smiled back. And then he said something funny and I did my best to fake a laugh. Thankfully, I’d reached my floor by then. I stepped out of the elevator and waved back at a man in his fifties (or older) who despite having lost his child was smiling at me with the best he had.

And that’s how I started my day.

Humbled, quietened, and amazed with the survival strength of my friend.

Just a few days ago, I heard on TV that there have been 4258 casualties in Iraq up until now since the beginning of the war in 2003. It felt terrible thinking that so many young men and women lost their lives and so many families lost their children for a purposeless war. But it also had me thinking that I didn’t know anyone who had lost someone in the Iraq war. It’s ironic that I finally met someone so soon after I was thinking about the same and, no, it did not feel good at all.

I have two cousins in the US army: both girls. One of them is deployed in Iraq at the moment. So far so good, and I hope and pray that it always stays that way. It’s a scary thought knowing that your loved ones are always in a danger zone. My respects go to those thousands and millions of families who have sent their children overseas to fight a war that rich #$#$#, who we vote into power, decided on sitting in the comforts of their orthopedic chairs in their cozy boardrooms chugging down beer obviously.

When I got back home today after the show, I told Pati that I finally know now as to why I don’t meet anyone who has lost a family member in Iraq. It’s because a good majority of these kids come from blue-collared family backgrounds. The same immigrants, the same colored people that some of the politicians and news channels who have a racist agenda continue to attack are the ones fighting these wars for the same politicians who attack them.

Irony at its best.

But this post is not to discuss the pros and cons of political policies and decisions. I don’t want to do that on this blog at the moment. Plenty going on in real life that demands energies that I can’t spend here getting involved in heated – yet informative – discussions. Maybe soon we shall fight blogging wars for causes – social or not – again. Inshallah.

Through this post, I just wanted to share the incident that happened with me this morning … and maybe that’d light up your thinking and/or empathy nodules too as it did mine?

Also, RIP Patrick Swayze. :|

Life truly does go on, eh?