And here, in fact, we are.*

My goodness but it has been a busy, tiring and frustrating week. I’ve been attending an NEH seminar in digital history, via Zoom, and though I have learned something about data software and making maps in QGIS, I’m lucky if I understand half of what gets said. The instructors go so fast that by the time I’ve figured out what button to click, they’ve moved five steps ahead and lost me. Clearly, I’m too old for this. Today (Thursday) was so hard that I finally gave up, left the office, and bought myself a $3 present at a local antique/gift shop. It’s a Cobalt Netting Lomonosov tea cup and saucer, though it was made in Soviet, not Czarist, Russia. Pretty, isn’t it?

Having returned home and sipped tea from my new cup, I felt calmer, and if not quite ready to face new computer challenges, at least less inclined to scream or burst into tears.

Enough digital drama; let’s move on. I promised an update on our recent trip to Saratoga Springs, NY to celebrate our son James’s birthday. Tim and Tim’s girlfriend also joined us. We had a grand time exploring Saratoga, eating out, going to the movies, and socializing without masks! We visited Tim’s office at Skidmore,

and the house where a dying Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs. It’s sad to think that the only way the former President could provide for his family’s future was to sell his past (so to speak). I can’t imagine how he managed to write anything coherent while dying of cancer. Now that’s heroic.

Our timing was off, so we didn’t get to go inside the house, but we did walk around the grounds that overlook the valley. The view is tremendous. The flagpole in the background of the next photo marks the spot of the last visit Grant made to the overlook a few weeks before he died. One can imagine him in his wheelchair gazing sadly over the farmland below.

When we weren’t sight-seeing or relaxing in the Airbnb, we found time to visit Tim and Abbie’s apartment in Glens Falls, where James and I tried out Tim’s virtual reality headset.

VR was not as odd as I thought it would be, and did not make me feel queasy the way shaky-cam movies or computer games do. One really does feel immersed in a world. I have to admit it was pretty cool.

That said, I will always feel more comfortable holding a pretty teacup or standing on a hillside pondering U.S. Grant than using any kind of machine, no matter what it can do. Real objects acquire a wear-and-tear patina that no computer can reproduce. Think about the people who, through repeated use, produced the mellow finish on your wooden furniture, the comfortable wear on your favorite upholstered chair, or the tiny chips on your china. History is present everywhere if only we would bother to notice, whereas the digital world must remain forever artificial. Yet, here I am uploading this post to that artificial world. Go figure.

In case you wondered, the DH was in Saratoga with us; he just managed to avoid the camera.

*Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities