A 1961 Lincoln.
On an ordinary day in an ordinary year, an odd letter arrived. Its snow-white, linen-like envelope glowed some within the mix of the day’s otherwise drab, non-descript mail. I gazed for a spell at the evocative assortment of bold-faced and widely spaced letters assembled as “THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC 20502.”
Better still, more of this magnificent font addressed the envelope to our house.
Nearly three years had passed since the effusive wave of support had culminated in Barack Obama being elected as President of the United States in 2008 – the first-ever of African descent.
The notion that America might truly be moving on from its dark age of racism; one that had plagued the nation throughout its entire existence, inspired me on to his inauguration.
Ahead of that pilgrimage, I had mailed Obama a U.S., one-cent piece (minted with Abraham Lincoln’s venerable visage) with a string threaded through a small hole that a jeweler had drilled.
He and I were both born in 1961, an obscure item I acknowledge, and, from which I likely gleaned more meaning than he. Still, I was certain he would appreciate the copper’s colloquial connection to Lincoln, whom he so revered.
Additionally, Lincoln’s own electoral win in 1861, with its connection to his declaration of war on his own country — an odd way to woo independents — perhaps inspired Obama’s self-proclaimed audacity.
Why not, then, a lucky charm of sorts, this iconic, little ’61 Lincoln? My daughter, a few years older than the Obama girls, added a note extolling the virtues of our clownish little beagle, given the highly publicized hoopla over the quest for a canine in the new administration.
After driving south from Orillia, I crossed the border at Buffalo, where I boarded a train for D.C. I passed the 12-hour trip watching rural, western New York glide by, while reflecting on that nonsensical notion that Obama was born in Kenya.
Initially, it was comical, then, quickly discomforting for the malice in its manifestations. Lapsing into some silliness, I imagined a stern FBI briefing, flush with firm faces reading from folders with authoritative dissertation. An “apostrophical-slip” was to be added to the archives containing the matter of “magic bullets” and “missing chads,” positing profoundly, that Obama was, in fact, … Irish!
Here I was, Walter-Mitty-me, hurtling east on the Amtrak, musing mirthfully at what just might be. I was convinced that my gift to the President would be received with outright enthusiasm, even some glee. Why, yes, I’d accept Obama’s invitation to the White House; a role in the oval office? that would be fine.
I disembarked from the train in D.C. into the adulation already assembling for the novel new President’s inauguration, still nine hours away …
Four years passed quickly.
The optimism around Obama, once so euphoric, had markedly faded. He’d been re-elected, but, less enthusiastically so. With political gridlock firming, and “Obamacare” flailing, America’s fissure was both widening and deepening.
I was travelling by train, this time to New Orleans, after having spent a few days touring some civil rights sites and some Civil War ruins.
Breathtaking was Martin Luther King’s baritone echoing from the National Civil Rights Museum, built around the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The civil rights icon had been gunned down there in 1968. It carried well, too, over the aforementioned war’s expansive green acreages of rolling-hilled cemeteries, with their little, white crosses in seemingly endless, picket-fence-like rows; through the windows of Rosa Parks’s bus in Montgomery; and from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
A statue outside of Alabama’s Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham, was simply perplexing. On it, two white college football coaches, already enshrined inside, were immortalized further, while the “Cotton State’s” native, black sons — Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron — an athletic pantheon, were confined to the interior.
Here, in the midst of the “Bible Belt” — a near-cartographical equivalent to the Confederacy — I wondered why some “Good Samaritanism” hadn’t held more sway. Then again, how hard for such a quaint pleasantry to compete with more rousing Sunday services that also boasted the gaiety of church picnics, with potato-sack races, egg-tosses, and, lynchings.
As Mississippi’s landscape languished by through the train’s window looking east, I observed that it was actually a poverty-pocked panorama, for this vista was mirrored across the aisle, in the pane opposite looking west.
With such equally bleak perspectives, which was the “wrong side of the tracks” was impossible to ascertain. Half-way along, near Jackson, I winced at an editorial in New Orleans’ Times-Picayune posturing indignantly that Louisiana, one of the first states to secede ahead of the Civil War, should do so again, given Obama’s re-election. Five other former enclaves of the Confederacy were as enthusiastically engaged.
Sadly, I concluded that Obama’s now distant inauguration would be the pinnacle of his presidency.
I was shaken from this contemplation suddenly when the braking train’s wheels announced New Orleans with the piercing screech of metal-on-metal along the rails. I threw my knapsack over my shoulder, and tossed the Times-Picayune into the trash.
… The letter was addressed to my daughter, but, she had given me the OK to open it. With an aim to preserve the intriguing correspondence from this office of such high acclaim, I manipulated the pristine stationery with archeological dexterity and care.
I extracted a plain, brown packet, such a stark contrast to the formal finery that had contained it, then, gingerly removed a miniscule message, in the plainest of fonts: “Because the White House does not accept monetary or related items, we are returning your enclosure in this envelope.”
This, an inanity of such preposterous proportion; why, my ’61 Lincoln, sent with such reverence to Obama, had been sent back to me with none!
There was no mention of the beagle, nor of any dog, for that matter.
Now and then, when mired in melancholy, I’ll pick up that ’61 Lincoln and roll it over and back along my fingers. It’s still the same dark-coffee brown, no more worn than when I sent it, but now, there’s a semblance of sadness about it.
With a hint of a smile, and an audible sigh, I do still marvel at the little copper’s philosophical heft — “E PLURIBUS UNUM” (of many states, one nation) — that so belies its diminutive dimension, and, too, the nation’s dismal direction.
Had that ’61 Lincoln been whimsically whisked on to Obama, I wonder how his legacy, and, America’s course, might otherwise be.
Luck of the Irish?
John Epstein is a former, 25-year Orillia business owner who left southern Ontario for the north years ago, and has never been back. He is now a freelance writer, whose column will appear monthly in OrilliaMatters. He can be reached at [email protected].
