Travel is different today. My phone is my ticket. I do everything online with my magic wand, or at my PC. Once exposed to the hang of this new world order it’s not so bad, but I do need to repeat actions several times to get a jar of muscle memory to develop the required mental dexterity. “How do I pull up those tickets again? The conductor is standing right here. Oh hell, where is that icon?”

These societal amendments are the basis of our culture’s persistent deflationary productivity increase. There’s no stopping it (aside from nuclear war, massive solar ejection, or an asteroid named Melancholia). And if you follow the stock market like I do, you are aware that the last month has seen a concerted new interest in AI, artificial intelligence. If you are paying attention, we are on the cusp of another revolution, of an extraordinary digital world utterly indifferent to our personal reservations, if any, to the changes we are about to witness. No one can foresee the full extent of what is about to happen, in part because our inventor class doesn’t have a handle, yet, on what is within the realm of possibility. Microsoft and chip maker Nvidia have led a market frenzy in AI related stocks, and, while the sky is the limit, experts warn of fluff. C3.ai was up 33% in one day – Friday. Ever hear of it? I didn’t think so. There is a just-below-the-surface excitement, invisible to the unsuspecting public, that the world is going to experience another mind-blowing evolution on a par with, or greater than, what the internet wrought.

Against this backdrop, I took a train ride. I’m a country kid and a farm boy never inoculated against the allures of the big city. I think I am lucky to live so close to New York City. I have discovered that if I travel off-peak and claim my senior discount, I can get down to the city and back for $23.

My daughter lives in Brooklyn, so we meet in Manhattan. We visit a museum, have an early dinner, see a movie and she walks me back to Grand Central. It’s what the city is for. If you don’t get down, you should. You’ll see. Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing like it. The train down the Hudson is worth the ticket. Sit on the riverside of the train and watch Cornwall go by and Bannerman’s Island and Storm King Mountain and then West Point. It’s an education, unique. The Hudson River is known worldwide as one of the most scenic waterways and we should take advantage of our luck. When it is windy there are white caps on the river waves. Bear Mountain Bridge, and then whenever we near Buchanan I can’t help but think of our unfortunate elementary class trips to the nuclear power plants at Indian Point. Pure propaganda. “A little Strontium 90, sonny, to go with that boxed peanut butter and jelly?”

And when I look at the water I can still see the great ships of World War II all tied together, mothballed. Over a hundred battleships and merchant vessels grey and rusting, lashed together, the “Liberty Ships,” or the “Ghost Fleet,” harbored here on the Hudson after the war’s end, a precaution, a reserve. Their existence was a temporal reminder to us Babyboomers that we were a boom because we were so close to that war, and we acted as a release from that war’s fear and destruction. Born to turn the point. Our parents had a chance to beat those arrows into ploughshares and those spears into pruning hooks. Never happened. Or did they? Did they have a chance?

With those great navy ships is the memory of my Uncle Dave who was on one of those ships, or one similar, in the Pacific during the war and came home, soon, to exhibit MS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, I couldn’t tell you the difference. But we visited him there, our father drove us down to the Montrose VA Hospital where he lived near the end of his life, across the river from the mortal ships also immobilized and declining, floating on the river like the water was their wheelchair. Looking for sun, Uncle Dave was outside in his permanent, green leather wheelchair with a blanket over his legs and there were hedges and gardens and wide sidewalks, and underneath his blanket, a carton of cigarettes – I think Pall Malls or Camels, but I think Pall Malls because they were longer, but he would smoke anything. I think I remember a beanbag ashtray on his blanket too, a copper ashtray sewn or pressed at the edges onto a beanbag of green canvas, the beans providing weight and stability, and the canvas was charred with cigarette burns. He chain-smoked with long yellow fingers as he was a tall man, over 6’-3, a Walden High School basketball star, and his fingers were long like his motionless legs. Whenever he saw me he called me Porky and jabbed his finger into my stomach, but I didn’t mind. He was the only one I didn’t mind such statements coming from, and I stood close to his wheelchair whenever we were together and helped push the big wheels. He asked me how the Yankees were doing. I stood close to his wheelchair and listened to the adults speaking and noticed how my mother’s words and presence made him calm, and how happy he was to see his brother, my father. I knew he was happy to see us and when he smiled I thought he must be the bravest man I would ever meet because they couldn’t keep it from me that he was never going to recover, that he was looking at an irreversible, incremental, imminent decline, and that he would never come home for more than a day.

Uncle Dave died in the summer of ’68; the last of the mothballed fleet was auction off in July, ’71.