September 10. Dream: I am at my parents’ place and my son comes to visit me. He arrives by train at ten o'clock and I wake up only two minutes before ten. I quickly put on my clothes and go out of the house. I want to go to the station by car, it’s my mother’s little red Polo, the first car I drove. I think I know where the Polo is parked, but the town where my parents live is unexpectedly bigger than I thought, so I call my parents to ask where the car is parked. My father says he will be right there and then we can drive to the station together, but I resent that. Only the parking spot I want to know. It is now forty minutes past ten and my son calls, he is getting impatient. I just have to get to the place where the car is parked, but now that thing when it’s getting hard for me to move starts again. Only with tremendous effort I manage single steps, and the more I try, the slower I get. Finally, I get stuck between people in a street café and cannot make any further progress. These dreams in which I can’t move are so realistic that each time when I wake up I almost can’t believe that it was just a dream and am very relieved that in reality I can move normally.

September 9. Installed studio monitors in J’s study. I still haven’t decided on one of the sounds of the stage piano and keep switching back and forth. Thinking about signal paths for hours. – J has a masterclass in which she is let into an essential secret of bowing. Later she comes out of orchestra rehearsal beaming.

September 8. As much as autobiographical writing interests me, I cringe when it comes to memoir. Autobiography as memoir seems stale to me. Anyone who starts writing only in old age, and has not spent their life writing, has to explain why only now.

September 7. The building is now largely occupied by Asian students who come to Columbia for a semester. Not longer: turnaround is high, no neighbors to get used to.

In front of CVS, a beggar sits on a folding stool, shoes off. – Sorry, I have no money for you. – Can you buy me a soda and chips, he calls after me. I don’t have the heart to buy chips, because they would turn my own stomach. I buy a soda. With calories, he can probably use them. I should have bought chips, too. It’s not my business, and he probably would have been happy.

September 6, Manhattan. Rain all day. Ran in the rain, virtually racing my son, who has set his mind on becoming better than his father, thirty years his senior. It won’t take long, but it will take the utmost effort on my part before I admit defeat. The day is otherwise filled to the brim with projects.

September 5. Five hours back downstate on asphalt bursting with rain. Around us the world has disappeared into gray, leaving only a narrow strip of exuberant vegetation sprouting out of the gray. The Earth has become a wet Venus. I’m more certain that further south we’ll have normal internet again than that this rainscape will ever end.

September 4. A few blown raindrops on the tarp this morning. Showers around noon. Been to Malone and shopped: a cast iron skillet for breakfast eggs, a folding table for Magic Cards, two new folding chairs, firewood. Yesterday was the actual holiday of Labor Day weekend, and we had to expect the worst.

Our neighbors: black-and-white camper and the usual two to three huge pickup trucks. They had several oversized, loudly barking dogs and yelled conflicting instructions at them. At one point, when the dogs almost freaked out because other dogs were around, one of them suddenly yelped abruptly; it was that unmistakable sound when a dog gets kicked.

We got two kinds of firewood: soft wood and hard wood. Hard was easier to get, and now we know why: it’s much harder to burn.

In the afternoon we rented a kayak at the lake and paddled across. J tells me later how annoyed she was at my awkward paddling, an annoyance I was oblivious to because I was sitting in front of her and she was completely in control of her anger. She realized that I couldn’t help it and was just paddling as well as I could, and anger certainly wouldn’t change that.

J feels that writing is the area where I am most definitely falling short of my potential. When it comes to running, I work steadily and systematically to improve. In music, I study what other musicians are doing and try to incorporate that into my own play. But she doesn’t see me studying other writers and trying to learn from them. She has been urging me for some time to take writers’ classes to expand my capabilities, and finds it incomprehensible that I have no interest in that. That must be something specifically German, she says, that you don’t think you can work on your writing systematically.

September 3. Now the days are too warm even for T-shirt and sandals. When the sun shines on our campsite during the midday hours, we move chairs and blankets for hours to stay in the shade. Stars overclear between the treetops, but only at the lake beach we see the big constellations: Swan, Cassiopeia, Big Dipper. I haven’t seen the Dolphin for so long that I had forgotten it existed.

It was so warm that I lost respect for the night, didn’t put on enough layers, and froze again. The next two nights are both supposed to be marginally colder, and I will be able to improve my sleeping gear. In moments when we have internet, retrieving the predicted temperature curves is actually cheating. One would have to prepare for the nights by studying the rustling of the leaves. I only heard it for the first time this morning, not at all yesterday.

Among all the bulky, streamlined campers in their demonstrative black and white, our hammock camp is the most primitive here. On our wooden bench are five bottles of whiskey, which we drink from coffee cups. We forgot plates. We laugh as we realize that we are almost certainly the richest people on this campground.

When we were kids camping with our families, we used to eye people like us somewhat shyly from a distance as weird strangers.

September 2. It must have been an unusual temperature drop even for the Adirondacks – the night was harshly cold, down to freezing. After seeing the forecast, we made a stop at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Albany and bought thermal underwear (“base layer”). Two layers of wool over that, hat, gloves, sleeping bags, and it was still cold. So cold, in fact, that I walked up and down the campsite from three o'clock to four because I couldn’t stand lying motionless in the hammock anymore. Condensating breath. Got up at twenty past six, made fire again. Thank you, fire.

We look into the fire, we look up at the domes of leaves, we look at the sky, stars if present. The restlessness of doing nothing else slowly dissipates.

Children’s voices reverberate between the trees.

September 1. Five hours to Meacham Lake. We arrive at eight, half an hour after sunset, and set up the hammocks in complete darkness, by the light of our headlamps. Fire. Whiskey.