As it turns out, I am not a Lincoln.

Now I'm full of malice, again.

What might have been…

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As I noted last week, proudly, I was under the very strong impression that I was the third cousin, five times removed, of President Abraham Lincoln, who you may have heard of.

My dear cousin Buck Jensen, who is a big, handsome dude, the image of his dad, and looks like his name would, indeed, be Buck Jensen. Buck does genealogy as a hobby, and thought my brother and I were related to Abe, or as, I called him for a week, Cousin Abe, because he’s chill. Cuz Abe, actually.

As I wandered through the Blue House With White Trim, the weight of the world on my shoulders, I pondered my historic obligations as a Lincoln. Then I decided to keep drawing editorial cartoons and writing columns instead.

I was talking to Tad about this while his mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, was on on Etsy buying clothes. Robert, of course, was on the back nine having a kind of mediocre round.

“You know, Tad, I was just pondering the fate of the republic when my brother got an email from Buck Jensen saying it was actually his mother, Ginger, who was related to Lincoln through Mordecai Lincoln.”

“Who is Buck Jensen?”

“Oh, some cartoonist’s actual cousin, no times removed. Just a real cousin.”

“Oy”.

Aunt Ginger was indeed a really lovely, fun lady, who was always very kind to me. She was a Ewing, which was connected to the Lincoln family. Not me. I was connected to the Ohman family, a bunch of Norskies and Swedes, whose only connection to Lincoln was we had a lot of pennies around the house, and my grandfather had a 1963 Lincoln hardtop.

l threw on my shawl and my stovepipe hat to go on a carriage ride on South Land Park Drive to clear my head.

Clearly, I had gone around the Lincoln bend.

I started to putting my foot up on a cracker barrel at the general store, telling all sorts of amusing Lincoln anecdotes. Oh, I was good at that. Both Abe and I were railroad lawyers in Illinois from way back, and we were also pickleball partners at the local club, so we got really good at spinning yarns.

I was more of a bullshit artist, which is the realistic phrase for yarn spinners.

Abe took note, but also said to me, “Waaal, sir, it occurs to me now that you ain’t a real Lincoln, anymore than that lawyer fella down in Palm Beach was my great great great grandson.”

“What do you mean, Cuz Abe? We played pickle ball together and everything.”

“No, we didn’t. Maybe you should lay off the caffeine pill/coffee habit and clear your head.”

The news that I wasn’t a Lincoln was pretty depressing.

I didn’t decide to go to the theater that night or anything (why go to the theater when you’ve got a smart 55” television with actual HDMI inputs?), but I was pretty depressed, like Cuz Abe would get sometimes.

I moped around in a ratty old full length brocade robe, wrote some notes on an envelope, and sent some nasty messages to General George McClellan, who also, for the record, didn’t ping me on FB Messenger or even leave a funny but true comment on Insta.

I trimmed the hair off off my upper lip one more time, wrote back to Virginia about Santa Claus, and told my cats some hilarious Jefferson Davis jokes I had been honing for a week.

“How many Jefferson Davises does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“None. They hadn’t invented the light bulb yet. But it does take 34 Jefferson Davises to light an oil lamp in the wind”.

See? Lincoln is comedy gold. It was altogether fitting and proper that I told the joke.

“Altogether fitting and proper” is an inside joke between me and my old buddy Don Hamilton in Portland, and he noted that it is in the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Don is also good at baseball and rock trivia, too, like Cousin Abe.

Finally I decided to talk to the reporters in my office, who then had to telegraph the stories fast (speed of light actually) back to their home offices.

“Gentlemen (Helen Thomas wasn’t in the White House press corps then; she was doing a summer internship at Harpers Weekly), let us be frank: my relationship to Abraham Lincoln has now been called into question, and I need to inform you of this fact, as I am no longer allowed to stare into a mirror and refer to myself as the Great Emancipator.”

“There comes a time, not four score and seven years ago, but one score hours ago, for a Lincoln to fess up, as we say in Hardin County, Kentucky, and Sangamon County, Illinois. Actually, I was born in St. Paul, but I am having a hard time letting go.”

“I am honor-bound to inform you, the dear people of our great Republic (Substackers), that the notion that I am a Lincoln wasn’t an act of a madman, or fealty to fantasy, but to an idea: that I could capitalize on my name”.

“Consequently, I am halting production of the Jack Ohman Lincoln mugs, the Jack Ohman dish towels, the red caps that say, MAKE ABRAHAM GREAT AGAIN, and all the other political flotsam and jetsam (are they they same thing? What’s the actual difference between them? Anyone?) that one does to personally enrich oneself over a newfound birthright”.

“Accordingly, I am moving Fictional Cousin Abe over to Patreon while we consult other genealogists to see if I am related to someone else cool.”

“It is altogether fitting and proper that we do so”.

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Hey, YBs! : Sorry about that. Being a Lincoln was fun for the weekend and all, but I am kind of relieved that I can ditch the stovepipe hat. It was a deal-breaker for my hair. More soon. Have a great day! —Not Abe’s Third Cousin