A couple of days ago, I was talking with my wife about this week's activities. She said that she wanted to run into town on Monday. She has a package that she wants to mail, and there is a book on hold for her at the library. Then, yesterday, when we were thinking about our week, we both realized that today is President’s Day. The post office and library will both be closed. She will have to run those errands tomorrow. It is not a big inconvenience for us. We are retired. One day is not that big of a deal for us.

President’s Day has been called the most confusing holiday in the U.S. In what my grandchildren call “the olden days,” when I was growing up, there were two important days for presidents in February. February 12 was Lincoln’s Birthday, and February 22 was Washington’s Birthday. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act, passed and signed into law in 1968, moved several holidays to always fall on a Monday, creating long weekends and avoiding midweek shutdowns. The law, however, did not take effect until 1971. For over 50 years, the federal government has had an official holiday on the third Monday of February. Even though the holiday has become popularly known as President’s Day, it is officially Washington’s Birthday in federal law.

However named, only 467 of the 50 states have a public holiday today. Indiana and Georgia celebrate Washington’s Day the day after Christmas, and Delaware has no public holiday for President Washington. Fourteen states have a separate holiday for Lincoln. Most of them recognize Honest Abe on February 12. However, Indiana has a day off for public employees on the day after Thanksgiving. Lincoln is credited with starting Thanksgiving in 1863.

Our state, named for the nation’s first President, recently had a hearing in the state legislature on a proposal to rename the state holiday, now officially known as President’s Day. The proposal is to make the holiday's name to honor just Washington.

As an old man looking back, I have trouble remembering how we celebrated Washington’s birthday when I was in school. All of the elementary school classrooms in our town had portraits of Washington and Lincoln at the front. We looked up at those portraits and the clock between them every day. We learned that Washington was the father of the nation and that Lincoln preserved the union. But I don’t have any distinct memories of how we celebrated Washington’s birthday.

On Lincoln’s birthday, however, a program was held in the school gymnasium, and one student was chosen to deliver the Gettysburg Address. I don’t remember which year, but we were all expected to memorize that famous speech in the fourth or fifth grade. I have a theory that it was the fifth grade, based on the fact that I can no longer recite the entire speech without making a mistake.

Last night, without consulting the Internet, any books or notes, I was able to recite the beginning: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here . . .”

And that is where I couldn’t recall the rest of that sentence, “that the nation might live.” The only bit I could remember was the end of the speech which is “ . . . these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The fact that my memory is incomplete supports my theory that I was required to memorize the speech in the fifth grade. There are a lot of things that I memorized earlier in my life that I can recite without a problem. I can recite the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, and other memory verses. I remember the piano songs I played for recitals through the fourth grade. I can sit at a piano and play “Italian Tarantella,” my fourth grade recital piece. I don’t know what piece I played for my fifth-grade recital. I know that fifth grade was my last piano recital because I was allowed to stop taking piano lessons after I picked up the trumpet as my primary instrument. My mother used to say that the reason I can’t remember my fifth-grade piano piece is that I quit practicing the piano in the fifth grade.

There is something unique about the things I memorized early in my life. I can still remember all kinds of things. I memorize passages of scripture to us in sermons. I can memorize short poems, but the stuff I memorize now I don’t retain. If I memorize a few lines from a play or a poem, I can deliver those lines for an occasion, but after the occasion has passed, I will no longer remember them.

If I were to invest the energy to recite the entire Gettysburg Address, it wouldn’t take long to memorize it and retain it for a few days. However, a year from now, I suspect I wouldn’t be able to recall it without a refresher. Part of it is lodged in my memory where I can access it, and part is not there.

The only George Washington quote I could come up with last night is one that has been falsely attributed to him. He never said, “I cannot tell I lie. I chopped down the cherry tree.” That is a fictional story. I suspect his most famous speech was his 1796 farewell speech, in which he warned against political factions and urged national unity. I cannot, however, recite even a sentence of that speech from memory.

So, happy Washington’s Birthday, President’s Day, or Happy February 17. However you recognize the day, may it make you smile.