The world on Cape Cod is a winter wonderland. I took the long way to my breakfast spot this morning and saw limbs split and broken from the weight of the snow, tree branches laden with heavy, icy snow and bent to the ground, fronts of houses hidden behind walls of snow turned to ice and side roads still covered in snow and ice, including mine. The sun is blinding. The temperature is 18˚.

Today is Washington’s Birthday or President’s Day: which one you celebrate depends on where you live. The fact that Washington was not born on this day does not affect in any way the cake and candles. It became a Monday so people can have a three-day weekend. Lincoln still has his own day in some states but mostly he is just throw into the President’s Day mix.

I knew lots of facts about some Presidents which gave them a bit of nobility far beyond those of mortal men. Those facts, however, later proved to be folk tales, myths. Washington never did cut down that cherry tree and for all I know he lied through his teeth which were not wooden even though they taught me that in school. Lincoln was Honest Abe because he walked a mile to return a customer’s change. He was also an educational inspiration. I had pencils and paper. He had coal and the back of a shovel. As for the Gettysburg Address, it wasn’t written on the back of an envelope.

Nicknames in those days were flattering. Washington was the Father of His Country and Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. I think it was President Nixon’s Tricky Dick which reversed the trend.

Many Presidents don’t deserve mention, but they still get a piece of the day. Lumping them all together is a good idea because I suspect none of us would celebrate Hoover Day unless we were talking about a really good vacuum cleaning or Gerald Ford Day because there isn’t a reason for him to have singular recognition. Besides, I’m still mad at him for pardoning Nixon though I did feel bad when he fell down those plane steps. Jimmy Carter got attacked by a rabbit which is another event we don’t celebrate, and he saw a UFO though I like that about him. One slang word for a certain male body part is a johnson. LBJ called his Jumbo. That’s a fact!