Ever since I experienced problems with a WordPress “plugin” that prevented the distribution by emails of notifications of new posts, the number of readers of my blog has dropped dramatically. I think readers who rely on receiving notice about new posts assume I am not writing while on my journey. The same problem removed the “like” button from my blog, so readers cannot even signal that they saw what I wrote. I suspect I can correct the problem, but it will take considerable dedicated time; time I am unwilling to spend while “on the road.” Consequently, I suspect very few people read about my travels and my thoughts while I am away. Once I correct the problem (assuming I really can correct it without paying for help to do it), I may post a summary, with links to older posts that may have gone unnoticed and unread. Or I may not. The readership of this blog is small, to start, so the work involved in attempting to recover from the issue may not be worth the trouble. Sometimes, technology can be a pain in the ass. Maybe I should just rely on Word to record my thoughts and memories for myself. We’ll see. Indeed we will.
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Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
~ Saul Bellow ~
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Dan Rather’s persona as a journalist always has made me cringe a bit. Though I believe his reporting has toed the line of journalistic integrity, on more than one occasion the way he reported the facts seemed, to me, to border on the overly dramatic. I vaguely remember him reporting on the devastating power of a hurricane. Despite the intensity of the storm, the words he chose and the manner in which he held his body—as if the wind and waves were about to plunge him into a watery grave—seemed overly sensational. That not withstanding, the information he provided has been believable, reliable, and honest. In other words, he performed admirably as a journalist. This morning, I read a piece he and Elliot Kirchner published in the blog/newsletter, Steady, on the Substack platform. I wish everyone, especially Trump supporters, would find it and give it a fair reading. This piece is not overly dramatic; it is honest and quite sobering.
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Yesterday, we drove all over Schenectady and beyond. We saw locks of the Erie Canal. We spent time sitting in a wonderful coffee shop in the Stockade district of Schenectady. We drove by houses where mi novia’s family used to live. We stopped for lunch at a Caribbean diner/restaurant. The day before, we went to the Gerald B.H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery—located in the village of Schuylerville in Saratoga County, New York—and found the headstone of her father’s grave. While in Schenectady, we wandered about the historic Vale Cemetery, where we found the headstone of her grandparents’ graves. And she showed me the house where she lived until she was ten years old. And, as has been our custom in recent months, we looked at houses for sale, trying to find that perfect house in that perfect location—the place that would be “perfect” for us, should we decide to uproot ourselves from our home in the hot, humid, maddeningly ultra-conservative South. Our time in Schenectady, though only a few days, has been delightful. Today, we depart for (as yet) places unknown.
Our route may take us through Pennsylvania, a corner of Maryland, across West Virginia, and into Kentucky as we make our way southwest toward home. Or we may opt for a different route, one that takes us across New York state, clips the edge of Pennsylvania, and crosses Ohio and Kentucky. In either case (or another, different, path), we’ll eventually slide across Tennessee into Arkansas and then home. Whichever route we take, we probably will arrive back home considerably earlier than we had planned; we thought we would be gone at least three weeks, maybe four or more. But we are considering the possibility of shortening this trip a little so we can embark on another fairly lengthy journey in the relative near-term. Perhaps we will pick just one or two destinations and go to it/them, with the idea that we will put down roots for several days so we can behave more like tourists than vagabond travelers. Time will tell.
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The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.
~ Nicolaus Copernicus ~
