My west coast brother was bemoaning the fact that today is "Presidents' Day" with two presidents' birthdays just lumped together. I will admit that I am so old that I remember celebrating Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday as separate entities. With quite a bit of emphasis put on chopping down cherry trees when we were young and memorizing Lincoln's Gettysburg Address when older. I don't remember memorizing any of George's speeches. I do remember, with humiliating clarity, reciting the Gettysburg Address. First, as a little background, I attended Lutheran school from K through 8th grade so I was very familiar with memorizing (hymns, Bible passages, catechism pages, patriotic poems and more) so memorizing the GA wasn't the challenge. But this was my sophomore year in high school, where, being the glasses wearing, geeky, tallest girl in the whole school, I was, to put it mildly, self conscious. Still, I was feeling pretty confident until I walked into class and saw that our teacher had set up a microphone and was going to record everyone's recital. I have no idea why he would want to do that. I made it through the ordeal, but years later, at a class reunion, one of my classmates was remembering the event and said he could see my knees knocking. Ah, high school, so much fun.
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