Lufthansa flight 490, Frankfurt to Seattle
(Somewhere between Iceland and Canada)

The moon was just some broken tooth or pink stone, the way it sat in the clouds looking in at us. We stayed at an airport hotel and enjoyed it more than I thought we would. They had picture books with Bowie and Freddy Mercury, a plasma screen with hashtag Instagram stuff, two men with beards in flannel kissing. Charlotte and I got into a fight (1 of 5, or more) and I said get your fucking shoes on, but it provoked no response. We watched a Quentin Tarantino film about Nazis and bad Americans with Brad Pitt set in France, two hours of people saying and doing hateful things to one another, but enjoyed it immensely. Then Lily got a message on her phone in the other room and started hyperventilating at a crux point in the film and I had to pause it, and sat watching the frozen still of a Nazi smiling from the other side of a desk with my Schwarzriesling, feeling sorry for myself while Dawn went in to deal with it.

On the airplane monitor, a flight simulator of the earth angled like the start of a movie with us in it, 35,000 feet above the surface. The moon rose and the colors turned pink, purple and blue—and when I tried to photograph it it looked like a Rothko. At the airport terminal the way to check in wasn’t as obvious as you’d think, and I had to get a trolley for our luggage then try to find a lift, was lucky for a man who spoke English, who guided us to the last door on the right, “over the top and come down,” he said: but we had to do all the check-in and baggage ourselves, and then I got picked for extra security by way of the four S’s on my ticket which is random, they said. And we were walked by the security guy to another checkpoint where I hoped it would give me a story, but I just had to open my bag and let the guy feel my ankles and feet which he did with rubber gloves on, making a face.

We stopped at a kiosk so the kids could spend the money Eberhard’s mom gave them and I bought a can of beer: the cashier said if I returned it she’d give me 25 cents, which I did on principle—and then she said in perfect English, we don’t work here as many hours as you do in the States, some of you do twenty-four seven, she said.

“Discreet Music” is the name of a Brian Eno album from 1975 and also a new blog series I’m running through January, prompted by a journal-writing theme I started in Germany over the holidays. It’s inspired by the David Sedaris book I’m reading that chronicles his journal entries from the late ’70s onward.

The goal of this series is for me to continue working on ‘found insights’ and observations throughout the day that are both personal and universal, and trigger thoughts and feelings in readers. Thanks for visiting. — Bill

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Discreet Music, journal writing, mid-life crisis, parenting, postaday, prose, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer