Sunday, May 6, 2001
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Sunday, May 6, 2001 |
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It all started in a little log cabin
It's Saturday, April 28, 2001. It's 12:30 p.m. as I open my laptop and flip on the power button. The computer is in my lap with the top resting against my steering wheel. I'm sitting in front of Abraham Lincoln's birthplace. I am alone. I am quiet. A baby is crying somewhere nearby. A tour bus just drove off. Folks are coming and going from the visitor's center behind me. I have not been in that building. I'm not going in. I have already experienced what I came for. It has affected me deeply. I suppose I should go in the visitor's center and get the dates and all the details which I probably should mention if I'm going to talk about Abe Lincoln's birthplace. Information like the date the cabin was built. The year Thomas Lincoln bought the land. The year Abe was born ... But that data is not important. Not today. Not at this moment in time. Not to me. You see, I touched it. The sign said "don't." but I did. It even said please don't touch the cabin. So I walked around it where nobody could see me and leaned back against the massive marble wall of the structure that now houses the cabin offering protection from the elements (and disobedient hands like mine) and just stared for the longest before I did it, all the time knowing I shouldn't. Now I understand how damaging it could be if every hand that walked through the monument touched the fragile structure. And I understand I broke a rule by touching it. And some part of me is sorry. Very sorry. Sitting here frozen somewhere in time behind the steering wheel of a car that does not belong to this place I want so much to explain how it is with me and wood. ... I have always been able to sense something animate in wood. And we're not talking termites here. I think it is emotion. Feelings. Love. Hate. Anguish. Misery. Joy. Not all wood, mind you. Just some wood. It can be a house. Or a fence, or a piece of furniture and in all honesty, nine times out of ten or maybe even more often, I don't feel a thing. But sometimes I do. If you are thinking I'm about to tell you I felt the presence of old honest Abe and thus I was compelled to confess that I touched, you're wrong. I am confessing for only one reason and that is to remind you and me of something very important. Every child born into this world no matter where that birth occurs, no matter the ethnic background or socio-economic status of the family every child in America has the potential to have an impact on the world like Abe Lincoln did. That's what the log said to me. I had to sit down on a bench against the wall to let it sink in. The park ranger walked around to where I had deposited my weak legs. I wasn't about to tell her why I'd felt compelled to sit down. How long have you been here? I asked. I started out here with the park service and I've been here ever since. And when was that? Twenty years ago. Twenty years she'd been keeper of the cabin. No way was I going to confess what I had done. That chimney is not original, is it? I asked her. No, it's not. And many of the logs are not original either, are they? No, but some are. Like I didn't know. Too well. It wasn't until after Lincoln was elected president that a doctor in these parts decided to make a monument of this place, she said. By then, several families had lived in the cabin and replaced logs and repaired it here and there. It is almost just like it was the day Little Abe was born, though. And some of the logs are truly believed to be originals used by Thomas Lincoln when he built this house for his family. I sat listening to her, staring at the log I had touched. Quietly recalling the vast number of lives Lincoln touched and still touches today. And remembering that nearly two centuries ago he was just some mother's newborn baby in an obscure cabin on an even more obscure hill in Larue County, Ky. I wonder if that old log knew who it was he sheltered.
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