Excerpts | Saying nothing in particular

Destination Unknown

“What troubles you?” Asked Frau Schwimmer in a voice quivering on irritation. All of the other passengers were nesting comfortably in their seats, trying to catch a few hours of sleep before landing on the other side of the world. But not the young woman assigned to the aisle seat next to her.

“Nothing, um Nichts.” Thirty thousand feet below lay snow and ice infinitum. Ahead, the veil of darkness called night. Soon the plane would cut through that veil like a silver arrow rounding the curve of the earth, that is, if it didn’t crash in the frozen wastelands of Northern Canada. If that happened, Flight 32 would be lost forever. No search and rescue team would ever be able find the wreckage in all that whiteness. The passengers would have to eat each other to stay alive, like the Donner party. That is, if the plane landed intact, which it wouldn’t. It would tumble across the tundra, leaving bodies mangled in the metal as food for hungry polar bears.

The fidgeting continued. Frau Schwimmer noted the crumpled map on the young woman’s lap. “Where are you going?

“I don’t know. The town is called Gunthersblum but I can’t find it on the map.”

“We will find!” Frau Schwimmer pulled an industrial sized map of Germany out of her woven travel bag and patted the young woman on the hand. “Have not angst.”

Easy for her to say. She knows exactly where she’s going!

The plane shook violently. The seat belt lights flashed. “Air turbulence,” the pilot announced in English, then German, then French.

He’s lying. The plane’s lost an engine, sucked in a goose, or ruptured a gas line. It was going down.

Frau Schwimmer unfolded her map and calmly spread it over their two tray tables. “Ist these Gunthersblum Nord or Sud?”

“I don’t know.”

What an idiot? Frau Schwimmer’s thinking. Who flies to the other side of the world without knowing where they’re going? Certainly not her thirty year old daughter, the one already established and on her own in San Francisco.

“First we check index.” Frau Schwimmer ran her finger down the list of towns and villages: “Gunthersblum. Nein, Gunthersberg? Nein. Guntherslauten? Nein.” She turned to the hapless young woman. “You have perhaps written down the wrong name. There is no Gunthersblum.”

Dear Blogging Buddies – I’m re-editing a story that was published under the title The Graduate Present back in 2016. This story has taken me so long to write that it bears little resemblance to the maiden voyage on which it was based. Except for Herr Azmus. I have my high school yearbook to prove that he, at least, was real.

Shame on you Herr Azmus! You should have warned your German class about bidets and putzfraus!

For the last couple of months I’ve been blogging about the wild time I had on my first trip to Europe, which would have lived on only in a cardboard box had it not been for a writing contest back in the 1990s. The challenge was to write about “our wackiest travel adventure.” I immediately riveted back to my ignorant youth when I traveled the world naively believing that the universe would take care of me. Twenty years later that challenge evolved into THE GRADUATION PRESENT (on Amazon now). Of course it’s impossible to remember everything that happened 40 years ago so this book is primarily fiction. However, there are a few real life incidents that I just couldn’t help adding.

My Uncle Bob (who I stayed with in Europe) read the first drafts of the book and said:

“I don’t remember any of these things happening, Jan.”

To which I said “That’s because it’s a work of fiction!”

He looked at me oddly. “But Gunthersblum is real and Worms is real and I’m real!”

“Okay, there’s a little real even in fantasies.”

Still dissatisfied he went on to ferret out the real. He couldn’t. Forty years is a long time. This particular scene which he vehemently denies ever happening actually did:

“Did you see all those young lieutenants at the bar?” Uncle Bob asked as we waited for our meal.

“Yeah,” I lied. I couldn’t tell a lieutenant from a general.

“Well, I figure that they’d all love to take a pretty American girl out to dinner.”

“What?”

“I was thinking, why should I be the one who has to feed you when there are all those young studs who’d gladly …”

“Uncle Bob!”

“You know, you’ve gotta learn to use what you have while you still have it. Think of it as the law of supply and demand. You’ve got the supply and they’ve got the demand,” he said, taking a chomp out of a breadstick.

Whereas the following scene is complete fiction, although the character of Lou was loosely based on Uncle Bob’s boss at the time:

Outside it was dark. The rain had stopped. “She sleeps!” The Moroccan shouted again. Lou appeared a few minutes later in the door. I could only see him in silhouette but I could tell he was livid. His aura was bright red.

“Where have you guys been?” I asked innocently.

“I was investigating your kidnapping!” he snorted.

“My what?”

“YOUR KIDNAPPING!” he yelled, stomping his foot like an enraged Rumpelstiltskin.

The following bit of musing was inspired by listening to my uncle’s friends who were WWII vets talk about their experiences:

I thought of those young kids from small-town America, about to jump from a rattletrap plane into the unknown, for that one last moment believing Hollywood crap of fame and glory, then dropping with fewer chances than a duck in a shooting arcade into an alien land, a land they’d been assured would include cheering crowds and willing women, which they would never see because they would splat like frogs into marshes filled with dung or float to earth full of bullet holes. And they were the lucky ones.

I wish some things in the book hadn’t really happened but they did, such as:

Unfortunately Uncle Bob was wrong. Not every moron on the planet can pass the army typing test and I’m living proof of that fact.

I made army history by flunking the idiot-proof army test three times.

So a bit of truth and a whole lot of imagination went into the writing of the book as I imagine is the case with most novels.

Next time I’ll post the first chapter of the book. Oh, the drawings on this page are doodles drawn by the cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, the armed forces newspaper, as we sat drinking Heinekens in the bar of the Officer’s Club in Worms Germany. Alas, I’ve forgotten his name. If anyone out there recognizes the work, please let me know.