Happy 200th birthday, Abe — honestly!
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, and as you might have noticed, he’s been getting a lot of press lately.
Books, books, books about him. Revisionist theories, counter-revisionist theories, bunkings and debunkings and outright frivolities such as Christopher Buckley’s spoof of Lincolnmania at The Daily Beast.
We don’t mind. We like Abe. (I know, I know: We’re supposed to like Ike. He’s looking better these days, too.) And we especially like the little private celebration that occurs every year on this date at the Lincoln statue in downtown Portland’s South Park Blocks, near the Portland Art Museum. That’s where Friend of Scatter Laura Grimes discovered this bouquet of thanks this afternoon and quickly commemorated it with her cell phone, a year to the day after one of our very first posts, also on the subject of Ms. Grimes’ encounter with this selfsame statue. Thanks, Laura.
And happy birthday, Abe. Thanks for the guidance. We’re still trying to get it right.
February 13th, 2009 at 9:30 am
That would be Christopher Buckley, I think.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:00 am
You’re so right. I substituted the Christopher I don’t like for the Christopher I do like! (It’s not a matter of politics; it’s a matter of bombast on the one hand and wit on the other.) I’ll fix this this slip of the keyboard forthwith.
February 13th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Now that you’ve edited the original citation, I can’t remember who it was: Christopher Hitchens?
Ms. Grimes’s photo of Honest Abe is delightful, in a looming nightmarish kind of way. “Perhaps if I bring Mary daffodils, she’ll let me skip the theater tonight.”
February 13th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Well, my fingers originally types “Hitchens,” although they meant “Buckley.” Bad fingers. I, too, like the looming-ness of that cell phone photo, and I like the idea of Abe bringing flowers home to Mary, maybe less in the hope of getting out of the theater (it was a comedy, after all, and right about then he really needed a good laugh) than of getting Mary to cheer up. Fat chance on that.