Friday, April 29, 2016

We were coming back from somewhere, riding in a van or a school bus, the family and maybe some others—my dad and brother, maybe. We drove past a demonstration of Ferrari Formula One cars, and I was sorry we hadn't known about it, that we'd gone somewhere else instead. There were two cars, driving around a track with banked turns. We watched for a while, amazed by their beauty. They turned into fighter jets. I tried to take pictures and videos of them as they flew past. It was hard to pan fast enough to keep them in the frame. Also, my camera was just a little disc, about two inches in diameter. It was hard to hold it steady between my fingers. There was an indicator when it was shooting video, a flashing symbol, but it wasn't working reliably. At one point a jet flew high, directly overhead. It hovered for a moment and then flew straight down, right at us. I thought I got a video. It crashed near us, causing God knows what damage and loss of life. Apparently the pilot was suicidal. I wondered how often that happened. I imagined how the pilot might have been able to change his mind, to pull up at the last moment and fly just off the ground, scaring people but not killing them.