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The 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Salamis — the decisive naval battle of 480 BC in which the Greek fleet, vastly outnumbered, devastated the invading Persian armada in the straits near Athens — fell on September 29. So we went to take another look at the nautical objects in the Piraeus Archaeological Museum. It is not exactly a small museum — it is housed in a high-ceilinged, two-story building in the port of Piraeus, next to the remains of a Hellenistic theater — but it receives few visitors. Even Piraeus taxi drivers don’t always know where to find it. Tourists usually give Piraeus a miss; they tend to be ‘museumed-out’ from the big museums up the road in Athens.

Batavia, New York On a brutally hot and wasp-swarming late summer mid-afternoon I walk our town’s old cemetery, as is my wont — hey, if I’m gonna live here for eternity I may as well get to know the neighbors. Walt Whitman swooned over one of this boneyard’s residents, and I have come to read the relevant passages to the boy who rests under the sod. His name was Stewart Glover, and he appears in Whitman’s diaristic Specimen Days to illustrate ‘the terrible and tender realities’ of war-death. Glover, Whitman tells us, grew up in Batavia with his father, John Glover, ‘an aged and feeble man’. (I dunno: his gravestone says Pop lived to the ripe age of 83, dying in 1873.

As ruins go, Royaumont is as good as any. French roads also being what they are, Royaumont is about 45 minutes from Saint-Denis, the cathedral in Paris where the kings of France are buried, and perhaps 20 minutes from Chantilly, where as much English as French is spoken on the racecourse. Beginning his reign in the 13th century, King Louis IX chose Royaumont as the site of one of the Cistercian abbeys he was building. Dying while on crusade in North Africa, he probably never saw what was reputed to be the most magnificent of all Cistercian abbeys in the whole country, the rival of Mont Saint-Michel or Fontevrault. Royalty notwithstanding, the Vatican singled him out for canonization.

New York City In grim times such as these, New Yorkers tend to flatter themselves for possessing special reserves of moxie, an outdated word that connotes courage, brio and a kind of raffish know-how. Think of Humphrey Bogart as Rick, a nightclub owner in the film Casablanca, when he jousts with Major Strasser, the German bully who thinks he can outsmart and intimidate him. Pressed to reveal his background and political beliefs, the poker-faced Rick replies: ‘I was born in New York City, if that’ll help you any.’ Asked if he could imagine the Germans occupying New York, Rick retorts, with a little extra moxie, ‘There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I would not advise you to try to invade.

We had lost the habit of checking the national statistics of infections and deaths from COVID-19. They didn’t mean much in Budapest as the summer wound down and the city visibly revived, with heavier traffic and more restaurants open. But then there was a spike in cases in next-door Croatia, and the Hungarian government pondered closing the borders. That threatened our hope — desperation, really — for a beach vacation. We were the most locked-down couple in town. My wife had broken her heel and been confined to our apartment for four months, and I’d been stricken with sciatica and moved like a glacier. To our relief, the Croatian statistics were not too alarming and the Hungarians postponed restrictions. We still had to work out how to get to Hvar, though.