Testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure

Thanks to Lawyers, Guns, and Money for reminding us that today is the 142nd anniversary of the speech by Lincoln at the dedication of the cemetary at Gettysburg.

It's beautiful and inspiring, and no less relevant today than it was that day as the sun burned off the morning fog. Take two minutes and go read it. It's 235 words. It won't kill you.

As a rule, it's editorial policy here at p3 that I try not to bore you with stories of my childhood, but many of the things I do (and write about on this blog) make a lot less sense if you don't know this one:

My dad was raised and educated on McGuffy Readers. Before Hooked on Phonics, before New Math, there was McGuffy, and the educational system built around it involved memorization--elocutionary drill--of classics and near-classics. I have his Sixth Eclectic Reader (copyright 1879) on my bookshelf.

(Oddly, on the flyleaf, he's written "Wm. Percival Nothstine, Circleville Ohio, Pickaway County" in very lovely script with a square-nibbed pen. That's odd because his middle name was Millard, not Percival. There were no Percivals in my family, as far as I know. He was William Millard, his father was William Clifford, and his uncle [my father's great uncle] was William Absalom [a magnificent middle name if there ever was one!]. But I digress.)

Whether declamation from memory just seemed natural to my father, or whether after all those years of taking it himself as a boy he was itching to inflict it on someone else and there I was, I remember sitting at the kitchen table getting drilled on the Gettysburg Address, the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, and other bits of prose, poetry, Old Testament verse, and (to my late-awakened understanding when I finally learned he'd been a projectionist during the Depression) Marx Brothers schtick. I can still recite all of it, and stuff picked up later, from memory.

This was not a side of my make-up that made me automatically loved by my students during my professing days. How well I remember the look on their faces when something would trigger it: Oh, Jesus, I could see them thinking, he's going to quote something again! But I confess, years later, that that look was part of the fun.

Thanks also to Lawyers, Guns, and Money for keeping the memory of Warren Zevon alive.