…conceived in Liberty…

All day my thoughts keep returning to my years in second and third grade.

If you know the history of my childhood, you may remember that I was hit by a car in the second grade, out of school for nearly six months, and lay in a body cast for a season. However, my mother was not about to let me fritter away all that time just lying around and watching television. No! We had to have projects! We had to cultivate interests! So with my public-school-tutor’s help, we created all kinds of ways to read and write the time away while encased in plaster.

My mother asked me in the hospital: “Who would you like to write a biography about?”Keep in mind—I was just beginning to write in cursive, so now when I ponder her query, I think it almost outlandish. But I responded that I would like to write about Abraham Lincoln.

When I returned home to 2460 after six weeks in the hospital, I found my room decked out in all kinds of Lincoln memorabilia so as to stimulate my biographical musings. There was the Lincoln bedspread, the Lincoln portrait on the wall, the Lincoln bust on my nightstand, the Lincoln bookends, and of course, Lincoln Logs on the floor waiting patiently for when I could lounge around effortlessly again. And then there were the picture books, the children’s books—all eager to be devoured so that a junior historian could get to work.

I am remembering the second and third grade today, not just because the anniversary of the accident (just to remind and clarify—I was walking across the street on a walk light on that sleety November morn!) is this week. No, it is in the second and third grade that I have my earliest consciousness of loving history, specifically, the history of the United States, and loving thinking and talking and reading and writing about politics.

When I finally came back to school, I had a book report to offer. So I offered my own biography of Lincoln as my report, and while these were probably meant to be fairly brief reports, I stayed up in front of the class talking about Abraham Lincoln much, much, much longer than was allotted for my time. (Things don’t change—I need bells and whistles and bombs to go off so I stop teaching now, too!). That spring my mother and grandmother took me on pilgrimages to see all the Lincoln sights in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect trip! My poor sister Elizabeth couldn’t imagine a more perfect torture.

What I thrilled to in those days was that phrase in the constitution—“in order to form a more perfect union.” I loved that, and I consumed every book I could find on American history. I memorized the presidents forwards and backwards—seriously, I am that weird, forwards and backwards.

But in the third grade, things got even more exciting for me! I wrote to President Nixon (guess who had that idea? My mother wouldn’t let me rest!) and got a great souvenir book from the White House in the mail. Then there was a presidential election—nothing could be more thrilling! I ran around Westwood Elementary School asking who my peers would vote for—like, you know, if we were 18 and old enough to vote. This one guy, Frank, actually asked me why I cared! I told him—you have to care—it matters! It is what Americans get to do! I did my own tally, and hours before the rest of America learned that Richard Nixon had trounced George McGovern, I knew from those who knew what was going on that he would still be our President.

It was in the third grade that my mother gave me a book of plays, plays about American history. I marvel at the fact that I ever gave other careers a passing thought, since it should have been clear the map destiny had for me in the glovebox. History! Drama! I spent the winters in the indoor playroom at Westwood School casting and directing these plays. Couldn’t have been happier!

Wait—there was something even more monumental around the corner in the spring of the 3rd grade. It turns out that my grandmother was an acquaintance of Charlie Taft, a prominent Cincinnati attorney and politician and, here comes the motherlode—the son of a President! Did I want him to come to my school and talk?!! I would have given up a Lincoln bookend for such a treat!

So on this auspicious day, Mr. Taft came to talk to my class about being a child in the White House in the early part of the 20th century. My mother had contacted the press—she could get someone to do almost anything—and there was a story about a boy who loved history meeting a man who walked through history.

So this morning I woke up about 4:15 a.m. Jordan time—too excited to stay in bed any longer. This political junkie needed to start the day watching the news programs from yesterday in the United States. Election Day! The day we do what America gets to do. Just in case you are wondering—everyone here, it seems, is riveted by what will go on today in America. They ask about it, ask about voting, and muse about the candidates.

In a couple of hours I will go to the American embassy in Amman for a party to watch news reports. (Do you think they will spring for some good food?) Then I will come back about midnight and there is a posse of guys in the dorm who want to watch the returns all night. Then at 5:00 A.M. those who are interested will get up and go to the Dining Hall and eat an early breakfast and watch the reports on a huuuuuuuuuge screen TV. Don’t you just love it!

My mother had been a political scientist in college, and I guess, some of this interest (obsession?) is just genetic. But it is also about growing older and studying America more and appreciating the institutions, the struggles, the changes, the obligations of being American. I remember a comment that my wonderful friend Doris Jackson, the rock, said to our students in our course together on the Civil Rights: “Voting isn’t just a privilege. It isn’t just a right. It is an obligation. You must vote, for people died for that ability to cast their own vote. People died.” Doris does not want us to take our democracy for granted.

As an adult I came back to Abraham Lincoln. I had put him aside for about 15 years pursuing other joys in history. But then I came back as an adult, fascinated, not by the boyhood stories, but by his will, his determination, his melancholy, his ethics, his values, his savvy, his frustrations, his anger, his vision. He is one of my favorite writers, too. I mean look at these phrases: “the mystic chords of memory,” and “better angels of our nature,” and “the father of waters flows unvexed to the sea.”

The myth about the Gettysburg Address is that he wrote it on the back of an envelope on the train, but evidence shows that he had been slaving over it for days, finishing it in the guest room, just a short while before its delivery. He had been very low in the polls at the time, and I imagine he hoped to stave off failure. Let’s remember that this battle had been the bloodiest confrontation in American history, with 51,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing after only three days of intense battle. What could he say?

Gary Wills wrote a marvelous book in the last couple decades about the Gettysburg Address, and he explains what happened after Lincoln stopped talking after that very short, 272-word speech: “The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America.”

Today I think back to drawing Lincoln’s beard with crayon, building dioramas and models of his boyhood cabin with Elmer’s glue and toothpicks. I made stovepipe hats out of construction paper. I memorized the Gettysburg Address.

My new friend Nancy confided that she almost resisted accepting the offer to teach at KA. She said, “I couldn’t believe I wouldn’t be in the United States for this election. I almost turned down this adventure so I could be at home and take it all in.” Instead, Nancy is doing what teachers do—explaining the twisty-turvy Electoral College, teasing out the ideologies of candidates, and talking to non-Americans about what we get to do. We get the chance to see the impact of the United States and our election from thousands of miles away.

Just a little while I called my friend Christy in New York. She, too, got up early today. She said, “Doesn’t it just feel like Christmas? All that excitement and nervousness?”

Today Americans get to do a spectacular thing. And tomorrow, under a “changed sky, a different America” we will write a new chapter in our history.

And whom ever wins, there will be a peaceful transition. Last year, just weeks after I was in Kenya, they had a national election, and for days afterward there was strife and bloodshed in the streets. I can pretty safely bet that won’t happen in the United States this week.

Whichever patriot you support, go stand in line, revel in the proudest moment we have as an American, and make your mark in as Lincoln intoned, “a new birth of freedom.”

My heavens, it is great to be a historian!