September 24. J’s birthday. All four of us woke her up and sang Happy Birthday. Played Happy on the bluetooth speaker she got as a gift and all of us danced. Ate cake. Played Abducktion. Then Magic again. Trampoline. – When I tell my youngest son that I particularly like his expert explanations, he wants to know which explanations I mean specifically.

September 23. Watched Barbie movie, bought Magic cards, played Magic for several hours. Also, continuously: Kerbal Space Program, Universe Sandbox, Space Engine.

September 22, Gothenburg. Together with all three children for the first time. Completely unpredictable dynamic. My adult son asks me questions, penetratingly. I take his questioning as a model and try to ask back.

September 21. Tonight Sweden. At twenty past five, to be precise. And we land at a quarter past one our own time.

September 20. This house is now almost a dorm for Asian students who spend a few semesters at Columbia. I am getting older, because I realize more and more how little they notice their surroundings. They stand in your way and don’t clean up properly in the gym. They are the usual annoying young people, I am the usual grim old man. I would only have to get to the point where this insight into the usualness spares me all the corresponding behavior patterns. A kind of serenity is waiting there somewhere. I will find it.

September 19. Told my son I am proud of him. Strange phrase. I’ve rarely heard it, and I have a hard time imagining what it means to anyone. Of course I’m proud of him. But doesn’t he know that? I say the phrase just in case.

September 18. This could be the first moment in which I realize that my grasp on German is slipping. It’s J asking so many detailed questions about words, and then I sometimes realize that my knowledge of them is no longer complete. They sound dangling. Case in point: The Tatort yesterday, in which I was not able to tell whether the language was ancient (twenty-five years old), or badly written, or actually the way people talk even today.

September 17. Drove another hour upstate to the distillery of our favorite whiskey. It’s all wooden sheds and a sort of garden under tall trees, picnic tables and lawn chairs around a fire pit. A food truck. There are fifteen different kinds of whiskey and vodka, all composed, enriched with a wide variety of flavors. The fact that we can buy this whiskey – only the basic variety, not the special compositions – in Newburgh is because they personally drop it off at the Liquor Store.

Watched a Tatort in the evening, twenty-five years old. J picks up more and more German words.

September 16. This should be easy. The Hudson Valley turning into an actual valley as you get further north, the hills getting higher and turning into actual mountains, yet the water just as flat as it has been the entire journey, and the sun low behind the mountains, so that the mountains get halos, while becoming dark silhouettes, while the train moves among them, so that very soon, the sun comes around behind those mountains again, and much of the eeriness vanishes, as if it was just an instant of a dream.

September 15. Upstate by train. Hudson rough, whitecaps, water texture in evening sun. Sky in disarray: Wisps of clouds in several layers and morphologies. At the bottom something like dark gray fog, which could be mistaken for rain clouds if it weren’t so transparent. Far above veils of cirrus, also lots of blue. Contrails in different stages of dissolution.