In the shadow of Lincoln

While my old body is balking at the notion of trying to attend the Obama inauguration on January 20, I'm sorely tempted to make the pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial on January 18 to hear almost-president Obama deliver a welcome address. The Lincoln Memorial is my favorite place in Washington. As a great admirer of Lincoln, I've been there countless times.

Okay. More than an admirer. My friends and I used to have birthday parties for Abe. Not in jest but in reverence. I once baked a cake in the shape of a stovepipe hat for one of the parties. We recited his farewell address to Springfield, the Gettysburg Address and other Lincoln writings. We were solemn and respectful.

Even now, some of us routinely get together to observe his birthday, and Anne and Mary Ellen and I always call each other. When our friend Patti died 11 years ago, she was buried in the same cemetery as Lincoln was in Springfield, and the year before she died, Mary and I crashed the official Lincoln's birthday observance at the memorial to lay a wreath in memory of Patti and all us who loved her. We put a photograph of all of us as young girls in the bow of the wreath, which was left at the base of this statue. We called our group the "Lincoln Society of Athens, Ohio" and were invited to attend the ceremony the following year, too, having fooled the organizers into believing we were as legitimate as the others who were there in their hoop-skirt dresses and Civil War era paraphernalia.

And now we have another president-in-waiting who follows in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, who openly admires him and who will even arrive in Washington by train, just as Lincoln did, before he gives this address to the nation. It seems important to me to be there.

Crowd estimates are 500,000. Less than for the inauguration but enough to fill up the mall all the way back to the Washington Monument. I have nearly two weeks to decide. But hearing Barack Obama speak in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln may be as good as it gets.