A link to the past

Now that I have made fun of the new pennies that will be introduced starting with Lincoln’s 200th anniversary, I’ll get serious.

When I was a kid, my parents sent me off every Saturday morning for piano lessons. Supposedly it was to instill a little culture and add to my skills, but actually it was to get me out of the house so Mom could “dung out” my room. It only cost $1.25 per lesson, though that was in silver coin, worth considerably more today. Plus the ten-cent bus fare each way. We’re talking a buck forty-five in hard money every week. Today that money, adjusted for inflation, would buy an acre of midtown Manhattan. (Whoops, I forgot already—be truthy.)

Due to the bus schedule, I arrived at the music teacher’s house 45 minutes early, so I would go down to the basement and visit with George, her father. When I was 8 years old he was 96. He puttered around in his workshop, making things out of wood. He was a very vital, healthy man and interesting to me because he was born in 1853—before the Civil War, way before the invention of the horseless carriage and the airplane and radio and most everything else that was familiar in my life.

At that time I was starting a coin collection, consisting of pennies. Anything more than a penny could be spent for either a candy bar (5 cents) or a comic book (10 cents), so pennies were low-valued enough to actually be collected without interfering with what was truly important in my life. George took an interest in my collection, and would save up some of his pennies for me. I bought them one-for-one on occasion. One day he asked me what I knew about Abraham Lincoln, the figure on almost all of my coins. I responded that he was the sixteenth president, not knowing much more. “Do you know about the Gettysburg Address?” he asked me. “I was there when I was a little older than you, and I got to shake hands with the President.”

He said his father was an officer in the Union Army and was instrumental in setting up the Gettysburg Cemetery in Pennsylvania, where Lincoln’s address was given. Many of the attendees were welcomed to the house where Lincoln was staying, and that’s when George and his father met him and got to shake his hand. He asked me, “Would you like to shake the hand that shook Abraham Lincoln’s hand?”

“You bet!” I replied, and with his firm, warm handshake forged a link with history that is still with me.