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I was nine when my father's IBM 5150 slid off the dining table. The room went quiet in that particular way rooms do when something irreversible has just happened.

I didn't cry. I crouched down and looked. They were arguments, still in progress - a marriage's years of unfinished sentences finally laid bare on the floor.

My mother and I spent the next hour sorting paper rectangles by date. She told me about a girl who liked typing well enough to memorize the keyboard before she could spell. I asked if that was her. She said it had been, once.

I've learned to listen for that same brittleness in the thingsthe silences other people miss. In high school I started a tutoring circle for ESL freshmen, not because I was qualified but because I noticed how often they sat through class without a single word asked of them.

The IBM never worked again. But the habit of looking at the wreckage instead of away from it - that one stayed.