The professionals of modern, i.e. quantum, physics tell us that there is a real possibility of the existence of parallel universes, where there are quite possibly duplicate (or original) versions of all us. There's another you and another me in this complete parallel universe that is there, just we don't see it, and neither do we live in it.

Our restaurant... the staff holiday luncheon party down at Fogo de Chao this afternoon. Red meat sliced off of skewers, the enthusiastic exchanging of secret santa gifts I somehow have difficulties with... l touch my wine glass to my lips, but no desire to drink any of it. I don't have much to say. My inner Anthony Bourdain has vacated the premises. Leaving me tired and fed up.

So when we all went our separate ways, I walk over to 10th Street, from 11th and Pennsylvania, to check out Ford's Theater and its related museum. It's five of four, but they are happy to give me a free ticket, and soon I am walking down the stairs into the basement (with an initial twinge of claustrophobia on the stairway) into the modernized and refurbished museum. Recent presidents trade reading the lines of the Gettysburg Address on a big screen, a production of History Channel. Photo reproduction of Lincoln's family and cabinet and the array of generals involved in the Civil War, labeled for inspection. And toward the final corners, before going back upstairs, some juicier relics, a life mask, the suit he wore that night, the figure standing in his size 14 boots, the narrow door Booth opened, a hole bored into it. There is a timeline of Lincoln's last day, beginning with breakfast with family, that goes up to 10:15 p.m., and also one for Booth on that day, Good Friday, April 14. 1865. (Booth had attended dress rehearsal, and rehearsed shooting Lincoln at the right moment in the play.) About to go up the stairs, I see I've missed another section of exhibits, and there in a glass case, the little Derringer pistol 'very accurate at close range,' the actual silly little instrument Booth used to murder the great man.

Then you go upstairs. You come up a few flights and find yourself on the higher back end of the balcony looking down at the stage. To the right, going down some red carpeted steps you come to the Presidential box, an approximation of it (as there was fire that gutted Ford's Theater in the early part of the 20th Century), not a big room. The padded red upholstered rocking chairs, presumably original. The arrangement of the space leads one to see that there was not much space between Booth opening the door and the President sitting directly in front of him, a step or two, whether or not this is accurate to the original. The museum is closing soon, and there is still time to go out into the cold of early January, to cross Tenth Street (rather automatically in some form of jay-walking, as there is not much traffic on it, but for the big touring trolleys orange and green.) Then you show the ticket again, and you walk into the House Where Lincoln Died (what else to call it) and up the brief hallway to the small room in back where to your right, behind plexiglass, is the little bed, covered with a patterned bed spread, with white linen covered pillows. They laid him diagonally on it. About five or six chairs would fit, or do fit, comfortably in the room. Here, in the morning, at 7:22 a.m, Abraham Lincoln passed away.

I think sometimes of how we go to a museum or a memorial. We catch a sniff of some world created in the ideal, where people are impeccably kind and decent, where the system of society is just. The memorialized is as a picture to that universe of decent perfection where there isn't strife, where there is no need for things like war, where everything goes right and well and appropriately, where people don't do stupid things and get in to disagreements and contentions for silly reasons. We stand before the memorial looking in on it, as if through a window, from a world that has its offenses and its shortcomings and its mistakes. Because that is, inescapably, the nature of our own world, for some reason. An, at least at times, it seems that the greater you would be in tune with that parallel universe and its ideals, the more you would or will encounter strife in this particular world, on up to being crucified (in various ways), or, as in Lincoln's case, being shot by some little self-proud high-strung freak, even just as things were beginning to settle down and work out a bit (as they were for President Lincoln.)

He had a dream a few nights before, a portentous one, an ominous one, of looking down and seeing a body laid out in the White House wrapped in death's trappings, and in the dream is just about to ask, or find out, the mystery who it is.

"Woe unto the world, because of offenses," he quoted from the Bible in the Second Inaugural, knowing this world to have that woven in to its very nature. At Gettysburg, he recognized what 'increased devotion' it takes to live here in this world, how "brave" a 'struggle' to 'nobly advance' an ideal, to quote him loosely.


Later, a typical blogger, I thought of Robert Kennedy's 'tiny ripple of hope' metaphor, small amounts of energy from different epicenters adding up to become a wave. At certain places in space and time, perhaps we feel vibrations from beyond our own little universe, as if to vibrate in some harmony.

Perhaps such visits are ways of shaking off the material aspects of holidays and the gluttony associated with them. Stop and think, has a material possession ever made you completely happy in an uncomplicated way; have you ever been satisfied with a form of affection short of the sublime, or a relationship that didn't bring the reality of all worlds directly before you, fragile, miraculous, amazing and even holy?

And so we say thanks to Lincoln, for being just who he was, just so, a man who had once sought appointment to a particular office (we all have flaws), who then turned that experience into a kind empathy for all the motley people who showed up at The White House seeking appointment to various offices. He was a man, it seems, who had grown a lot in the course of his years, as if rubbing a patina on his exterior that let his true light, forgiving and humble, shine out.