30 ft is Roughly 40 Years long.

The plane in this picture is travelling at just over 500 m.p.h.... toward my father and oldest brother. 0.1 seconds later it adjusted pitch by about five degrees and forcefully landed into a group of 50 or so people in the box seats in front of the grandstands, making a two foot deep by six foot wide hole in a military grade tarmac.

By pulling up, the pilot probably saved a couple of hundred lives, including my father and brother's, exchanging them for 9 others.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to be grateful.

My dad said he didn't have his life flash before his eyes. There was just an adrenaline induced silence ringing in his ears as he stared down the Mustang as it slashed it's four broadswords frantically, trying to scare the crowd away, then a sound like a bag of flower being dropped on a wood floor.

If you've seen saving private Ryan, this would be one of the scenes that teenagers would talk about the next day, only this time the effects weren't digital. It's funny how we try to make movies as realistic as possible, yet we wish that no one would ever have to witness something like this.

My brain always pulls me to a larger scale. I am comparing my fear of what this post could have been about, then to what it is about for people other than my father, then to what it's like to people in war torn countries or people who lived somewhere in Europe and might have been shot at by the plain that hunted down 9 more victims a few days ago. Ultimately, I place this in the context of history, and somehow this becomes normal. This is our normal.

For my dad, 30ft may mean 40 more years on terra firma. By comparison, the world and it's history is 7901 miles wide.

It took 2 seconds for the Galloping Ghost to call in a mayday at 50 feet, roll out of control, climb 100 or so feet, and come down another 152. Dad said there wasn't enough time to have his life flash before his eyes.

I feel grateful, yet unsure. There is something here I have to accept, that 9 people died instead of my dad. There is a tension there I don't know how to resolve. It's like someone is letting a jazz chord hang in the air, maybe something diminished, and I wait for the resolving note to come. There is a beauty in the chord, but the dissonance haunts me. It sounds like it's going to hang in the air for at least another 30 ft or so.