My main character is a young student at Harvard in 1683. He has been at Harvard for about seven years, getting his A.B. (like a B.A.) in 1680 and now he has gotten his A.D. (Master's degree) in 1683. He loves the place; he will return and teach as a tutor for twelve years, and eventually become the President of the place. But for now, he has graduated and has to leave.

They have trouble getting presidents at Harvard. That's because they need a minister, and they need him to live on-site, and no minister can get their congregation to relieve them, because being minister is like a lifetime commitment. You don't just walk away from a congregation like that. So when Harvard needs a president, they have a hard time finding one.

THey have managed to talk one man into it, though, and he's due to come down with his family of five children, and move to Cambridge from Ipswich where he has been helping another man with a congregation. He's a qualified minister but not a full fledged one and that's why it will work. It takes a while, but finally he arrives and is inaugurated as president, right as our main character is leaving.

This is probably when our main character meets the new president's daughter, whom he will marry in twelve years.

In the year the main character is gone, the new President gets established, but then dies in the middle of a solar eclipse. This is 1684, so there's no telling what people thought of that solar eclipse.

When he comes back, he's a tutor. He's in a better position. He's set to live there for twelve years and ultimately to take over the place. But the daughter is now gone; she's married and had four children, losing two of them. When she comes back, he'll marry her anyway. She's the one for him.

I was sitting there at my computer, trying to write about exactly how I felt. I was totally in the moment, in touch with my feelings, ready to expound on why I felt the way I did. But all of a sudden, a portal opened up and I slipped through it, right as I was sitting there.

All of a sudden I was in a world where everyone had special powers, in particular the power to time travel wherever they wanted, and people were showing up from all places, all times, just to see me. I was like a novelty to them, so they wanted to see what I was all about. Some of them had come from as far as the fifth century BC, or in one case Tasmania, 1725. Sometimes I didn't even understand what they were saying.

Two of them got into a huge fight that had something to do with the potato famine. Maybe they had been on different sides and one of them had been hungry for what, a couple hundred years. I felt like getting that one some french fries but then I remembered that they were addictive and it was like giving somene cocaine. Some favor! I decided to keep my mouth shut.

In the end I learned that being from this time, this place, right in front of my computer and all, isn't really all that special, and that really there are interesting people in every corner of the space-time continuum as we know it. I did find one distant relative of mine but he said he was from the Canary Islands or some such place, and it was an incredibly long story how we were related, but I said I had time or at least I thought I did, and then, instead of waiting to hear exactly how we were related, I just borrowed five bucks from him since I figured, if we were related, that had to be good for something, no matter what space-time we were dealing with. When I got back to my computer it was actually before I had even left, but the five bucks was gone, maybe I spent it and forgot. That happens a lot anyway; I don't especially need a portal to slip into an alternate state, and then spend the rest of the day figuring out where I went and what happened to the little candies I thought I was carrying around.