In honor of this day that I've been anticipating with a mix of dread/longing/horror/anxiety/excitement/fear/loathing/nausea/etc, I bring you the craggy visage of America's greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, to ponder.
I was drawn to this sale because of its piquant description in the estate-sale company's email newsletter. They said it was at the home of a clergyman who was relocating to another country because he'd been given a new job. This brought to mind so many of my favorite novels—by Barbara Pym, Jane Austen, Trollope—where some curate or vicar moves to a parsonage because he's been given a "new living." When I find things that usually happen in novels are happening in life, right down the road in the next subdivision, I have to see the evidence.
I don't think Abe Lincoln was mentioned in the estate-sale ad at all. Which seems like a bit of an oversight, considering this otherwise unexceptional suburban home was crowded with Lincolns. Identical Lincolns, hand-carved and signed, all $645 apiece. It was surprising to see Lincolns presiding over the living room, and then in the master bedroom, but to turn a corner from the kitchen into the laundry room and find the washer and dryer covered with $645 Lincolns? That's when things go from the merely surprising to the marvelous.
We'll never know why the globetrotting clergyman had to shed his Lincolns for a new life. Maybe he just needed to travel light. Barbara Pym would probably come up with a better angle on that plot. Anyway, it's something to consider in lieu of obsessing over the exit polls today.
Another pleasant diversion: the trailer for the new Spielberg biopic about Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis. So. Awesome.
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