Houston, we have a problem...Life on Mars looks eerily familiar.

My initial intentions were to avoid vain repetition by posting tales of travel which have already been reported upon, as I am not a very adept teller of tales anyway. A genetic predisposition to exhibit signs of ADD prevents an economy of words and therefore dooms my attempts at storytelling to verbosity.  Tragically, however, I decided to write a bit anyway, just to be cruel.  Because I can. And because, glancing through as I was listening to my playlist for the blog yesterday, I noticed that I misspelled something.  Just for the record, I do know the difference between an ear and an era.  I did go to college and they did let me graduate.  
After leaving Hannibal, Missouri (every time I say that, though, I always think of Anthony Hopkins whispering, "Claaariiice?" through the bars of a jail cell.....kinda creeps me out, actually; anyway, to get on with the story...see what I mean about ADD?) we jumped in the car and headed towards Springfield.  It. Was. Amazing.  But, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Before traipsing downtown we stopped at a small restaurant on Route 66.  It lived gloriously up to my expectations.  The Cozy Dog contained all the necessary elements-walls covered in old signs, license plates, signed pictures of celebrities hanging side by side with pictures of the proprietor's family, an old hand gas pump, and yellowed posters advertising the "Birthplace of the Corn Dog."  To polish off the effect was a group of old men grouped together at a back table, wearing baseball caps and plaid flannel shirts their wives have probably attempted in vain to dispose of on multiple occasions.  They were awesome.  They met three times a week, one informed us, all amateur ham radio operators.  They should be made someone's brain-trust, seriously.  Inspecting the signs along the walls, I was amazed at how far the medical field has advanced.  Let me explain: we now have penicillin, vaccinations, MRI, x-ray, ultra-sound, etc. to help us diagnose and treat various illnesses and complaints.  One sign for a 'remedy' had a list which consisted of three columns of ailments and conditions the symptoms of which it could alleviate.  For instance: malaria, eczema, rhuematoid arthritis, nervous prostration (my personal favorite), and la grippe, just to name a few.  Sometimes I think maybe the old-days actually  were less complex-just spray some Windex on it, it'll be fine.  After leaving the Fount of Youth and Health, we turned the GPS to Camp Butler Cemetery.  After a slight mishap and a missed turn, we found ourselves in the.....hmmm, politically correct term.......ghetto.  We're lost in the ghetto and we speak a foreign language.  Then, right on cue, the lovely mechanized voice of the GPS informs us that it has "Lost Satellite Signal."  Suddenly I found myself longing for the comfort of the model airplane and Joe the Pilot's all-too-cheery thumbs up.  The roads were packed dirt, crumbling steps clung to derelict porches that looked as if the health department wouldn't condemn because it is not illegal to have a compost pile.  We passed a similar 'house' which had been converted into the local beer joint, complete with Budweiser sign hanging out front, under which the waitress(?) stood taking her cigarette break and chatting it up with patrons.  At three o'clock in the afternoon. Anyway, we traversed the Wasteland of the Protestant Work Ethic and found our way back onto charted roads.  Five minutes after regaining the ability to breathe adequately we pulled into the gates of Camp Butler National Cemetery.  It began life as a military training ground in 1861, after President Lincoln called for troops to answer the call to save the Union.  It very quickly became a prisoner of war camp for captured Confederate troops.  It has become the final resting place for veterans of every war since. Interestingly, it now also contains the graves of German and Korean prisoners of war.  Interesting that all those who fought so fiercely against each other now reside in plots of ground side by side.  I don't know why, as it really has no direct connection, but for some reason a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes kept running through my head.  It is used at the beginning of Ken Burns' Civil War documentary (EXCELLENT, if you haven't seen it yet; my dream is to work with Ken Burns one day-I get unduly excited about his documentaries.)  "We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.  In our youths our hearts were touched with fire."  There is just something artistic and poignant about those words. 
The next day, after recuperating from yet another near death experience, we headed for the land of Lincoln.  It was marvelous.  First we stopped in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.  When you ask my nephew, who will be two in the fall, 'how excited are you?' he squints up his eyes, balls his fists and tightens up his muscles until he shakes like an epileptic all while dancing on his toes.  That's how excited I was.  I was allowed to walk into the archives-I danced on my toes a little more.  Archives may sound boring and dry, but I like what FDR had to say about such things.  "To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things.  It must believe in the past.  It must believe in the future.  It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgement in creating their own future."

In the atrium of the the building was an exhibit dedicated to the World's Fairs which have been held in Illinois.  This was extremely interesting as my boss told me of the time, in the thirties, when her own father was able to visit a World's Fair held in Chicago.  He came home and told the relatives all about this amazing new box which sported moving images and sound, no one believed in his stories about this so called 'television.'  There were also many pictures of the 1893 World's Fair, with which, if you have read Erik Larson's non-fiction work "Devil in the White City" you will be familiar.  And, if anything like me, freaked out and paranoid.  It is the history of America's first serial killer.  The history of how they built the White City was interesting, if you ever do read it-just skip the Criminal Minds-esque chapters.  Anyway, I was going to include the Lincoln Museum/home in this post, but I have much to say on that subject, and I fear I may have already rambled into the thickets of verbosity again.  Therefore, I will defer my raptures until the next post.  Aren't you excited?    

We (I) decided the  squirrel should be named Phoebus. Apparently cemetery squirrels are well-fed, and the name "Phoebus the Fat" just sounds like the nick-name of some lunatic Roman emperor, doesn't it? (It had been a long day-remember the ghetto...)