Sunday, July 1, 2012

Mary Todd Lincoln

If anyone were to ask me before if I was a reader I was very very almost too quick to say "you're joking right?" I may have even thrown out a "heck no techno!" ... I know, it's bad but basically I hate reading!
Funny thing is I've always wanted to LIKE reading. I'm just not very good at it an to be honest it's embarrassing. At least to me. You see school has never, and I mean NEVER been any less than extremely painfully difficult for me. All through jr high and high school I was so socially and athletically involved that no one really thought twice that I would be struggling academically. I can talk my way out of any situation but ask me to take a test, read out loud or do anything with numbers and game over. And it's embarrassing! I was in a situation not too long ago where I was the only one who didn't know what NaCl meant and it took everything inside me not to burst into tears... So I burst into laughter instead (that's kind of become a thing) but I know that nothing in life comes free, even intelligence. You have to work on it.
Right now I am reading a book (for a summer class I'm finishing up) called "Mrs.Lincoln & Mrs.Keckly." It's the story of the former first lady and her friend and former slave who also served as a seem stress in the white house. Now I'm only just at the part where Miss Mary fist meets old Honest Abe but she is pretty stinking cool! She dreams big (almost too big for her own good) and nothing can stand in her way once she knows what she wants. Even at 14 she was saying that her husband would be president someday. She wasn't always the perfect lady but it was said that even among her suiters that it was her boldness and spontiunity was what attracted them. She never settled for anything or anyone even though so many people told she should be married by now (she was 22-23 when her and Abe met and back then she was quite the "old maid.") Mr. Lincoln wasn't the most attractive or already successful type, he was rather quite awkward, a little shorter but he was a gentlemen and had the biggest potential in the world, ad that's what she saw. That's what I love about her. She was smart and she knew it. But it didn't come easy to her either. When her mother died and here Todd's faster remarried an awful woman Mary clung to her father and learned. When the sent her to boarding school she focused and soaked every last thing in and made that place her home.
We my friends had one heck of a fist lady. And imagine, all that from a book.... Huh...

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