The Lincoln Society comes out of the closet

On your left is the official charter of The Lincoln Society of Athens, Ohio, phonied up by yours truly to allow two members to crash the official ceremony held every year on February 12 at the Lincoln Memorial to honor our 16th president.

In that picture are seven high school girlfriends who got together every year for four years to hold a birthday party for the man we most admired. We did not do this in jest. It was somewhat solemn while we recited from memory his famous and not-so-famous speeches, but when the stovepipe-hat-shaped cake or log cabin cake came out, we partied hearty.

We were dateless wonders in high school. Being a smart girl pretty much killed your reputation with the boys, the ones we disdained anyway because of their pronounced immaturity. But they did us a favor by not asking us out, because we formed lifelong friendships that thrive today.

Even after we all went our separate ways, we would remember each other on Abe's birthday, even if we didn't stay in touch the rest of the year. And many times, Anne and Mary Ellen and I got together in our adult years to attend the ceremonies and do something Lincoln-related. That man had a strong influence on our young, idealistic lives.

Some 35 years later, five of us got together in Florida to celebrate our 50th birthdays and to spend time
with Patti who was locked in a life-or-death struggle with cancer. She lost the battle, but we all visited and loved her and helped her accept what was so hard for all of us. The first of our group was facing the mortality of all of us. So here we are in her kitchen in Orlando, blowing out our collective candles.

Patti had an extra connection to Lincoln, having gone to college in Illinois, marrying a man she later divorced but in the process somehow coming to own a burial plot in the same cemetery in Springfield, Ill. in which Lincoln is buried. This was long before she remarried a wonderful man, moved to Florida and later got sick. Her body rests in that cemetery today, and one day we will do a pilgrimage there and light candles and celebrate her life all over again.

During one of our last visits to her, while tears were flowing, we told her we would one day lay a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial in her memory and that of all of those idealistic young girls. At first she didn't believe it until I told her I would find a way to make it happen and that she could send her spirit winging there to watch.

She died in September, and that winter, Mary Ellen and I began to plot a way to make our promise hold. I was living in Massachusetts, but Mary was still in Falls Church, so the planning and conniving got underway. It took only two phone calls and the charter shown above to convince the organizer of that year's wreath-laying ceremony to take us at our word and invite us to the service. We wrangled the name of the florist other groups used out of the somewhat dotty but sweet man in charge. And it didn't stop there. He invited us to all of the official functions. Now we were in deep doo-doo. I was bold enough to get us to that point but needed Mary Ellen's trustworthy reputation and demeanor to pull it off.

Not only did we order a beautiful wreath, shown below, but Mary put a tintype-looking photo of us as girls into the bow. We crashed the service with perfect aplomb and attended the after-service luncheon with others in Civil War uniforms and hoop skirts, some of the women wondering aloud just why they had never, after all this time, heard of us. Mary was our spokesperson, because I was losing it.

But the important thing is that we honored our promise to Patti and honored our decades-long friendship and honored Abraham Lincoln, as well. We did it! We even took along a "press crew" that consisted of Mary's husband, a lawyer at the Justice Department, and his serious-looking friend who had a camcorder.

And here's the proof. Here are Mary Ellen and Nannygoat holding the wreath. And below that photo is another of the memorial at dusk, showing our wreath front-and-center with a visitor peering into the faces of those young girls who found inspiration and purpose in the life of a great man, just as our new president and countless others have done.