July 23, 1885 was the day President/General Ulysses Grant died at Mount McGregor in Upstate New York. Before he died, his family was heavily in debt due mainly to a “Ponzi” scheme and poor investments. In order to clear the debt and to give his family financial freedom, he decided to write his memoirs. Mark Twain offered to be his publisher and together his memoirs would sell like crazy and in the end his family would be taken care of.
I took my kids to see Mount McGregor a few years back. I needed to see the place that Grant stayed while he wrote his memoirs. It is atop a little mountain and overlooks the expansive valley below near Saratoga Springs in NY. They chose to go to Mt. McGregor to escape the summer heat in NYC/NJ in 1885. The air was cooler up there, easier to breathe…less people there as well. There is an old photograph of Grant sitting in a wicker-styled chair with his back against the wall outside on the porch area. He is wearing a knitted cap, blanket over his lap and he has a pencil in his hand and the booklet he is writing in. I have viewed and reviewed this picture a thousand times. For whatever reason, I had to go there in person. I had to see the chair he sat in. I had to see the house he was in. I had to feel the atmosphere, the sounds, and digest the views. So, one day a few years back I did just that. My kids and I drove up the 3 hours from Binghamton, NY to “Grant’s cottage” in Wilton, NY. I saw his actual chair, sat in a replica with my own back up against the same porch wall he was against. I imagined the view that he saw, the cool air that he breathed. I imagined how much he had to overcome to write this memoir, but he did what needed to be done. It turned out to be magnificent in every regard.
We are all writing our own memoirs, I believe. Every post we write for Phil’s blog, every Facebook post we put out, every letter we write, it is our memoir. I remember asking Phil one day, “Well, Phil are you going to write a book?”. “The blog is my book”, he said. It made perfect sense to me.
I posted on Facebook not long after that as I continued to read horrible political banter…vitriol…that if people knew that everything they posted one day would be made into a book and that book made of posts would represent our lives, would they continue posting some of the things they posted?
In the Navy, the daily routine is written in what is called, “The Plan of the Day”, or P.O.D. Currently, my P.O.D. is Phil’s daily blog posts. Although I don’t respond to each post, like you all I am sure, I read everyone. In fact, I feel my day is not complete without reading what Phil is putting out for us to understand. I get an alert on my iPhone whenever Phil puts out his post. It is consistently the best part of my day. I am feeling like crap, “PING!” a post, I am feeling great, “PING!” a post, I am stressed with life, happy with life, tired, travelling, in a meeting….”PING!” It’s another post from Phil and you know what, I am better now……

Cheers:)
Ryck