I think I got this right and I just want to share what happened.  I was 
upgrading, but I walked away and let it run.  When I came back the screen 
was black with a flashing underscore in the upper left corner.  I waited a 
few minutes, nothing, so I tried the usual tricks to return it to life, 
nothing again, so I powered it off.  When it came back up, it seemed to 
mostly work, but it couldn't load Gnome and it gave me a white screen 
announcing that it had failed and I needed to log off and try again.  I 
did that and got to the login screen, but after that I couldn't log in -- 
it always went back to the white fail screen.

Then I searched the web and found this:

How To Fix Broken Ubuntu OS Without Reinstalling It
https://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-fix-broken-ubuntu-os-without-reinstalling-it/

I could ssh into the box, so I did it that way, using copy/paste from the 
web page.  And it seemed to work.  In case someday that web page is gone, 
these were the commands:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock
sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt clean
sudo apt update --fix-missing
sudo apt install -f
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

After that it worked perfectly.  For some reason the time was not being 
set automatically, so I went here...

Settings > Details > Date & Time

...and activated "Automatic Date & Time".  That fixed it.

I think I'm all set, but let me know if you see anything wrong with those 
commands.  Is there anything more I need to do?

Thanks in advance.

Mike