We have owned a condo in Montgomery County for a number of years and we are finally selling it this week. The settlement day is Wednesday, but we were given the option of signing everything virtually beforehand, so that we won’t have to travel to the title company. So, that happened today.

It would have been so much simpler to go to the title company. I think we each had to sign our name and initials about 30 times (yes, sometimes I exaggerate, but not this time) to various documents. Except that I had to sign about 90 times. You ask “why?” The answer is that, as the documents scrolled by you would see a yellow arrow that said “sign”, and next to it a pink colored space over where the signature was to go on the document. I assumed (none of this fancy stuff existed for the Yale Law class of 1967) that all I had to do was to click on “sign”, but in fact I had to click on the pink space. All “sign” did was get me to the next signing place on the next document, so I went through all 30 documents twice before I realized I was signing documents I had already signed, but that in fact I hadn’t signed any of them.

As the documents flashed on the screen, we were in a video conference with a Notary Public. The Notary Public was in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and we were in Washington, DC, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Now, I am used to notaries being in the same room, and the fact that we weren’t even in the same state (although we were electronically being connected through a data center in, who knows, maybe Bangladesh) was strange in my mind.

Now, you ask, how did the Notary know that I was I? (I think that is proper English, even though it doesn’t seem to be, and maybe shouldn’t be) Well, the answer, I thought, is that we had to upload our IDs (in our case drivers’ licenses which have our photo on them). When you upload them you have to make sure that your computer’s camera has focused on them clearly enough so that everything can be read. So I asked our Notary (who went by the name of Ryan) whether the photo was clear enough. His response: “I don’t know – we don’t see the photos.” Figure that out.

The system (called pandadoc) also asks us five questions as it verifies us. They are multiple choice questions, and sort of easy (i.e., which zip code have you been associated with?), but Edie did almost fail. One of the questions they asked me was to pick an address I had an association with and (somehow) that included my office address from 1991-1993. I picked it and passed. They asked Edie the same question, and this address (1 Thomas Circle) was one of her choices, as well. She answered “none of the above” (that was an option on each question), because she never had a connection with 1 Thomas Circle. Wrong! They also asked her if she was related to any of the following Hessels, giving her a bunch of strange names (the oddest was Herschel Hessel, I think), including Lindsey Hessel. We do have a cousin Lindsey Hessel in Portland OR, so that was Edie’s answer. Wrong again! The correct answer was “none of the above”. Shows the limits of AI, I guess.

At any rate, we were finally allowed to push a button that said “Finish”. The buyer will have to do the same thing, and then hopefully that will be that.

So that is how we started this week. We ended last week with two very busy days: first, an exploratory drive to see fall colors through Frederick MD to Thurmont (where we had lunch at the Kountry Kitchen – “just like home, but we do the dishes”), and on unexplored roads leading to two covered bridges (one in Utica MD, and one in unnamed territory, as far as we can see – we just followed the signs that pointed us to “Covered Bridges” – we also followed a sign that led (we thought) to “Old Main Streets”, but all we saw were fields and hills). We saw two interesting and new (to us) towns, Graceham (the biggest building, an old Moravian Church – do I know any Moravians – with nice old and modest wooden houses and a minimum of Halloween decorations, and the other Woodsboro, where everyone looked like they lived better than the average American. We then saw a newer town and that wasn’t at all interesting, called Eldersburg, which apparently has 30,000 people and no core, like a suburb in search of a city to attach itself to. From Eldersburg, we found our way to Route 97/Georgia Avenue, and made our way home.

Rural Maryland is beautiful almost anywhere you go, but its beauty is marred in most places by a general adoration for Donald Trump and extreme hatred for Joe Biden. I remember two weeks ago, in Boonsboro, which is west of our house, and not north like Thurmont and Eldersburg, seeing a sign that said “Biden”, rather than “F–k Biden” on a front lawn. I was so excited, I went around the block to see it again, and saw that I had missed the bottom and that the sign actually said “Biden Sucks”. But that was child play to what we saw this weekend. This weekend we saw at least six houses which had both large Trump signs and Confederate flags.

This might remind you of that old saying that everything in the United States outside of big cities in Alabama. And I think this might be an exaggeration (but not by a lot), but there is something else that is the opposite. [What is the opposite of an exaggeration, anyway? English language, you have failed me.]

This is because I have just finished reading Jeanne Theoharis’ book “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks”, which traces her brave and somewhat interesting life from Montgomery, Alabama, where she refused to give up her seat on the bus, to Detroit, Michigan, where she lived most of the rest of her life. It became clear to her that racism was different, perhaps, but just as bad in Detroit as it was in Montgomery, much worse than you might imagine it to have been. It reminded me of another book I read several years ago entitled “Arc of Justice” by Kevin Boyle, also about Detroit’s racism, when a black family tried to move into a white neighborhood. I know Detroit has good Greek food, but after reading these two books, you will have to work hard to prove to me that it isn’t a racist cesspool. (On Friday, I joined a group having breakfast with our Councilman Matt Frumin. Matt is from Detroit (or better a suburb thereof) and we had a lot of questions for him. But I didn’t get a chance to ask him that one I wanted to ask: Is Detroit a racist cesspool?).

There was more to our weekend. Grandson Izzy turned a very happy 3 and, while we didn’t have a traditional birthday party for him with kids or entertainment – I leave that to his parents – we did have a Mickey Mouse cake and dinner for his immediate family and three of OUR friends. Izzy was really happy with his Spiderman pillow, his large model Metro bus, his big tractor which you can take apart and screw together again, and his soccer ball. And really ecstatic when everyone sang happy birthday to him – he blew out the candles before we got beyond “Happy”. He is the youngest in his pre-school class, and we figure he finally felt he caught up with everyone else.

Other than that? We saw Edie’s old college friends, Little Red and the Renegades, at El Golfo Restaurant Saturday night. A lot of fun and good food. This was our third time at El Golfo – it’s a traditional Tex-Mex restaurant that calls itself Mexican, with good food and even better margaritas.

And last night (Sunday), we saw Aviva Kempner’s new documentary, “Pocketful of Miracles”, about her mother’s hiding in plain sight through the Holocaust and her uncle’s time in Auschwitz among other places – both had several narrow escapes and were separated during the war, finding each other in Berlin in 1945. Their pre-war and wartime story of spellbinding, and their experiences in America, where they lived for more than two thirds of their lives (her uncle, for example, was only 17 when he came here, having been living in prison camps when he was 15 and 16), which were as successful as their early years were painful. The film itself is extraordinary, blending perfectly their recorded testimonies to the Shoah Foundation (Stephen Spielberg’s project), with perfectly curated Holocaust footage, family photographs and video footage, and even excerpts from well known feature films. A “must” whenever you can get to see it.

[Edie hasn’t read this one yet – but boy will she think it is too long]