At the far end of the couch, where the dog waits for us when we’re gone, I laid my book and my head down and looked outside at the gray and the green. We were still on east coast time, it felt much later than it was. Dawn got up around 5 to make the coffee and I dreamed about a car flying up our road, with me trying to catch the license plate, yelling slow down there’s kids out here. I went for Bloody Mary mix and cocktail onions happy to be back home, my mom with us from Germany watching the pets while we were gone for spring break. We sat in the den sipping our drinks and mom handed me a piece of mail she brought back, something official from the German Stadt, a speeding ticket with my picture on it in black and white, looking fat. Lots of exclamation points and capital letters. The ice jammed up at the end of my drink and spilled on my chest, and I felt for it like a gun wound, where I’d been hit. Done with breakfast, all we had was time before dinner, a life spent in between meals. I’d trim my beard and put on something nice, take my mom the scenic way to the Italian restaurant, take the new car. I’d go back to the Alps in August for 10 days, then take time off around Christmas. Time off every four months or so. Sometimes it was hard to tell if I was really living or just watching myself go through the motions. I felt that way looking at pictures, disturbed by how bad I looked, like there has to be more depth to me than that, but maybe not.

Categories: Memoir, prose, writing

Tags: aging, creative nonfiction, humor, journal writing, Memoir, mid-life crisis, pacific northwest, parenting, prose, short form, William Pearse writer