As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
George Washington has been so carved a monument in people's minds, that for the sake of Americans to know who they are, to know that their President was as much a witty wag as Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan for a story or turning a phrase.
In the Washington letters, there is a snippet during his station at West Point at the close of the Revolutionary War, in which two ladies were to dine with him. In the following, General Washington writes with fun, the ludicrous nature of his having refined guests who would be eating off of iron plates and how the scene was one of a table 12 feet long for three people and the food stationed at either end out of reach.
"Since my arrival at this happy spot, we have had a ham, sometimes a shoulder of bacon, to grace the head of the table. A piece of roast beef adorns the foot, and a small dish of green beans—almost imperceptible—decorates the centre. When the cook has a mind to cut a figure,—and this I presume he will attempt to-morrow,—we have two beefsteak pies, or dishes of crabs, in addition, one on each side of the centre dish, dividing the space, and reducing the distance between dish and dish to about six feet, which without them would be nearly twelve feet apart.
Of late he has had the surprising luck to discover that apples will make pies; and it is a question if, amidst the violence of his efforts, we do not get one of apples instead of having both of beef."
The cook apparently had a love of meat as all 7 food groups, with a tolerance of green beans camoflauged by the immense table.
It is perfectly simple American humor in noting the discovery that pies could be made from apples, but not too many pies as a meat pie was mandatory, as no one would want fruit encroaching upon a full meat diet.
A movie should be made of the laughter of George Washington as he had a wonderful sense of humor. An officer challenged him to a jumping match over a hedge one day, and Washington allowed the challenger to go first, whereupon the horse cleared the hedge and sunk to it's belly in the mud.
General Washington rode up and said, "You are too deep for me".
You will note that the General did not even attempt the jump which hints he knew that mud hole was there and let the comedy unfold.
He loved to laugh and relished stories like General Greene in a mad frenzy searching for his wig........which was on the Greene's head.
Certainly, the President and General was stoic and reserved in public, but it was from knowing the duty he had to the office to honor it. George Washington would not tolerate a coward or a fool, but his hand was always extended to one of his Soldiers who he never forgot or to a servant he met.
There was wisdom in his humor and always caring as this quote is a turn of phrase in learning to smile through hardship.
"General McIntosh is only experiencing upon a small scale what I have had an ample share of upon a large one; and must, as I have been obliged to do in a variety of instances, yield to necessity; that is, to use a vulgar phrase, 'shape his coat according to his cloth,' or in other words, if he cannot do as he wishes, he must do what he can."
George Washington was cutting in his humor, to the humbling of himself. He once wrote to the Secretary of Congress about the recording of his commission. The jest of it was, if Congress would not record it, that Washington would in his own papers and perhaps his own family would care about it in one hundred years if the country did not.
"If my commission is not necessary for the files of Congress, I should be glad to have it deposited among my own papers. It may serve my grandchildren, some fifty or a hundred years hence, for a theme to ruminate upon, if they should be contemplatively disposed."
He knew the keen rock and hard place as husband and father, to women. This last pleading is the greatest man in the world at the time knowing that while he had defeated the British Empire, every man would always end up surrendering to a woman.
"I never did, nor do I believe I ever shall, give advice to a woman who is setting out on a matrimonial voyage: first, because I never could advise one to marry without her own consent; and secondly, because I know it is to no purpose to advise her to refrain when she has obtained it.
A woman very rarely asks an opinion or requires advice on such an occasion till her resolution is formed; and then it is with the hope and expectation of obtaining a sanction, not that she means to be governed by your disapprobation, that she applies.
In a word, the plain English of the application may be summed up in these words: 'I wish you to think as I do; but if unhappily you differ from me in opinion, my heart, I must confess, is fixed, and I have gone too far now to retract.'"
In all of this, one finds George Washington as witty and wise as Lincoln and as full of good natured enjoyment of the human condition as Ronald Reagan.
With the weight of humanity on George Washington's shoulders, he was stoic and resolute, but that was not who this charming gentleman was in total. George Washington laughed often and had a merry heart full of humor and American wit.
Let us not forget George Washington's heart in laughter in remembering it foremost in courage and morality.
agtG
