I Remember

by Abraham Lincoln

I remember rain hitting our tin roof;
And how windows rattled in the winter.
Shaking the grates filled the pan with ashes,
And made the stove pipe glow a cherry red.

I remember wind howling through window cracks
And powdered snow flying by, bending dry grass low.
How quick my feet got cold walking to the store.
And 1, 2 or 3 pairs of socks didn’t make my toes any warmer.

I remember coal slack, and how my mother worried;
Because slack could explode and send hot cinders everywhere.
She warned me many times; never cover the bed with coal slack,
Unless you want to burn the house down.

I remember how my fingers froze
Wearing cotton gloves to school;
The girls wore mittens and their fingers never froze.
Boys never wore mittens to school.

Boys wore Long Johns with a buttoned flap;
Girls wore long underwear with a slit in back.
Of course us boys never saw them on the girls,
But boys with sisters said they do.

And their flap was just a slit
That opened when they sat down.
Now that sounded pretty good to me,
If they had hole in front to pee.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I finished reading Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden. I should have realized this was not a true story from the day I opened the book. I must have been in a daze when I read the information about the author? I probably just assumed this guy had recorded the information from a living person and put it in book form. Or something? When I finished it I was still hungry for more. How was this lady able to stay in New York City in an expensive apartment; and own a small tea house; and it was then that I realized this was a, "novel" and that I had convinced myself this was a true story. It is a "novel." I never read novels about a woman by a man or the other way around. It would be like reading a novel entitled, "My Life as a Pig" by Mrs. Cow.

So books like Autobiography of a Geisha and Geisha of Gion: The Memoir of Mineko Iwasaki is the real thing and not fiction. What was I thinking?

Which brings me to the point that I have been at parties and watched and listened to Geisha play the Shamisen and the music that comes from it. I was absolutely in awe of these ladies when I was just nineteen years old, 9,000 miles from home, sitting on a straw mat in a tiny room somewhere in the Ginza in Tokyo. I had assumed they were high-class prostitutes but was told nothing could be further from the truth. There are prostitutes that parade around as Geisha and, their Obi tells you, 'I am a prostitute' but I was not aware of these fine points of Japanese dress at that time.

© 2006 Abraham Lincoln - All rights reserved.

Mrs. Starr, my English teacher, listened to me reading a story that I wrote for class. She critiqued my story while I stood in front of my Sophomore English class, embarrassed and red-faced; I was our class president and was elected by popular student vote and I had used the word, "raised" instead of, "reared." My country-school education (we had to start there and go through the 8th Grade before we were promoted on to high school) had never prepared me for words like this. I would always say, "She raised me" and at that time didn't know words like "reared."