It's Saturday, April 28, 2001.

It's 12:30 p.m. as I open my

laptop and flip on the power button. The computer is in my lap with the

top resting against my steering wheel.

I'm sitting in front of Abraham

Lincoln's birthplace.

I am alone. I am quiet. A baby

is crying somewhere nearby. A tour bus just drove off. Folks are coming

and going from the visitor's center behind me. I have not been in that

building. I'm not going in. I have already experienced what I came for.

It has affected me deeply.

I suppose I should go in the

visitor's center and get the dates and all the details which I probably

should mention if I'm going to talk about Abe Lincoln's birthplace. Information

like the date the cabin was built. The year Thomas Lincoln bought the

land. The year Abe was born ... But that data is not important. Not today.

Not at this moment in time. Not to me.

You see, I touched it.

The sign said "don't."

but I did. It even said please don't touch the cabin.

So I walked around it where

nobody could see me and leaned back against the massive marble wall of

the structure that now houses the cabin offering protection from the elements

(and disobedient hands like mine) and just stared for the longest before

I did it, all the time knowing I shouldn't.

Now I understand how damaging

it could be if every hand that walked through the monument touched the

fragile structure. And I understand I broke a rule by touching it. And

some part of me is sorry. Very sorry.

Sitting here frozen somewhere

in time behind the steering wheel of a car that does not belong to this

place I want so much to explain how it is with me and wood. ... I have

always been able to sense something animate in wood. And we're not talking

termites here. I think it is emotion. Feelings. Love. Hate. Anguish. Misery.

Joy.

Not all wood, mind you. Just

some wood. It can be a house. Or a fence, or a piece of furniture and

in all honesty, nine times out of ten or maybe even more often, I don't

feel a thing. But sometimes I do.

If you are thinking I'm about

to tell you I felt the presence of old honest Abe and thus I was compelled

to confess that I touched, you're wrong. I am confessing for only one

reason and that is to remind you and me of something very important.

Every child born into this

world no matter where that birth occurs, no matter the ethnic background

or socio-economic status of the family every child in America has the

potential to have an impact on the world like Abe Lincoln did.

That's what the log said to

me. I had to sit down on a bench against the wall to let it sink in. The

park ranger walked around to where I had deposited my weak legs. I wasn't

about to tell her why I'd felt compelled to sit down.

How long have you been here?

I asked.

I started out here with the

park service and I've been here ever since.

And when was that?

Twenty years ago.

Twenty years she'd been keeper

of the cabin. No way was I going to confess what I had done.

That chimney is not original,

is it? I asked her.

No, it's not.

And many of the logs are not

original either, are they?

No, but some are.

Like I didn't know. Too well.

It wasn't until after Lincoln

was elected president that a doctor in these parts decided to make a monument

of this place, she said. By then, several families had lived in the cabin

and replaced logs and repaired it here and there. It is almost just like

it was the day Little Abe was born, though. And some of the logs are truly

believed to be originals used by Thomas Lincoln when he built this house

for his family.

I sat listening to her, staring

at the log I had touched. Quietly recalling the vast number of lives Lincoln

touched and still touches today. And remembering that nearly two centuries

ago he was just some mother's newborn baby in an obscure cabin on an even

more obscure hill in Larue County, Ky.

I wonder if that old log knew

who it was he sheltered.

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