Marching on Gettysburg with daughter, 12

(679 words)

I’m doing something tomorrow I haven’t done in more than 20 years: I’m getting in the car and going for a long drive hoping I can get a girl to fall in love with me.

The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, even as the girl is lower than any other.

She’s my 12-year-old daughter and we’ll be consecrating our weekend together in the blood of dead heroes.

We’re going to Gettysburg. As prelude, I’m yanking her out of school today for lunch and an early screening of Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”

My march to Gettysburg is every bit as important to me as Robert E. Lee’s was to him. It’s do or die.

As the country is poised on a fiscal cliff, I sense Josie and I are perched on a personal one.

I understand in a year, maybe months, she won’t be applying the brakes as she approaches the cliff. She’ll be flooring it.

It’s perfectly natural. I remember at her age being so eager to grow up -- and just because it still hasn’t happened with me doesn’t mean it might not happen with her.

She’s starting to understand the joy of camaraderie, of being with your own, of friends banding together against common enemies.

That’d be Dads.

And I’m playing my role, too.

As she’s starting to test the boundaries of her freedoms, I’m there standing guard against her going too far. Kids need that.

To mix in another military metaphor, she wants me on that wall, she needs me on that wall (DVR alert: “A Few Good Men” 20th anniversary showing, Saturday, AMC, 8 p.m.).

Many fathers of daughters I admire say the same thing. When a daughter hits about 13, she just goes away from her father who as a result of her biological and emotional changes becomes an even more alien creature next to Mommy.

They say we’re on the verge of a Civil War destined to last about five years, a little longer than the duration of what many of our Southern friends still refer to as “The War of Northern Aggression.”

A natural pacifist, I will do everything I can to avoid the inevitability of the coming storm.

That means taking my sockdologizing old mantrap of a girl on a daddy/daughter weekend to Gettysburg.

Calling a girl a “sockdologizing old mantrap” probably doesn’t sound like a term of endearment. It is with me and J-Ro.

It was a year ago when I was reading Jay Winik’s outstanding Civil War history, “April 1865: The Month That Saved America.”

Josie was watching something I deemed insufficiently worthy and told her to shut the damn TV off. I had a story I wanted to tell her.

I read to her the part where John Wilkes Booth skulked into the presidential booth at Ford’s Theater and waited for the precise moment when actor Harry Hawk calls an adversarial character a “sockdologizing old mantrap.” The insult provoked the biggest laugh of the play and Booth hoped to use the guffaws to cover the pistol’s clap.

And those were the last words Lincoln ever heard.

The story had the intended effect. Josie was mesmerized.

She became even more fascinated when I told her Lincoln died 47 years to the day before Titanic went under.

So we bond over history and when I was invited to attend Lincoln Remembrance Day festivities in Gettysburg, I seized the opportunity.

Tomorrow she and I will drive four hours, tour the battlefield, visit the museums and on Monday morning witness the 149th historical reenactment of  Lincoln reading 263 of the most powerful words ever written (this is already plus-600 for those of you keeping score).

But it won’t be Lincoln and all that happened between Union and Confederate that’ll matter most to me. It’ll be all the little father and daughter moments in between. I will revel in the talks, the secrets and the togetherness of times I know she’ll never forget.

Me neither.

See, this weekend despite what we filled out on the school permission slips isn’t about studying history.

It’s about making it.

Related . . .

• Of humdingers and sockdologers

• Daughter, 4, thinks Dad works too much

Of humdingers and sockdolagers

I wonder if Abraham Lincoln died confused.

The thought occurred to me this weekend as I was reading aloud what happened in Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, just moments before J.W. Booth’s bullet hit bone.

I’m probably the only father on earth who can call his 11-year-old daughter a “sockdologizing old man-trap” and know she’ll understand what sounds to modern ears like nonsense.

Those were the last words to ever enter the conscious ears of the great Lincoln.

And I can’t believe that trivia’s evaded me until now. I don’t remember reading the words in all the Civil War/Lincoln assassination books I’ve read over the years until I read Jay Winik’s outstanding book, “April 1865: The Month That Saved America.”

Or maybe I dismissed them as gibberish after failing to find “sockdologizing” in any of my dictionaries.

Either way, two things have happened in the meantime: One, I have subscriber access to the world’s humdinger dictionary: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) which, by the way, defines “humdinger” as a remarkable or outstanding person or thing.

The dictionary defines more than 600,000 words, many of them long since dropped from common usage. By comparison, my sturdy and still useful American Heritage Dictionary includes 155,000 entries, and studies show the average American uses and understands about 10,000 words.

So if I want to know what the heck “sockdologizing” means I know exactly where to look.

But what would cause me to do so?

That’s where my sockdologizing daughter comes in.

She’s nuts about the Lincoln assassination. It is one of two historical topics that rivet her young imagination.

The other is Titanic. And in her mind she can’t think about one without the other since I told her both happened on the exact same day. Lincoln was shot on April 14 and died the next day; Titanic struck the iceberg on April 14, -- anniversary alert! -- 1912, and she sunk the following day.

So last night we’re poring over the details of Lincoln’s final moments when I discover another historical coincidence: the third last word Lincoln ever heard was exactly what doomed the unsinkable ship.

Titanic was sunk by a sockdolager!

The OED says “sockdolager” is a heavy or knock-down blow.

The word was a key line in the play “Our American Cousin,” which the Lincolns chose to attend so they could decompress following the Confederacy’s announced surrender.

And you have to wonder how history would be different if they’d have opted to just stay in and order a pizza.

Was Lincoln aware of the word’s meaning? How many participants in the high-brow Sunday talk shows would know how to respond if someone tossed sockdolager into the conversation?

The scoundrel Booth deliberately timed pulling the trigger to the sockdologizing line hoping the laugh getter, one of the night’s biggest, would muffle the blast.

We all know what happened after that. Lincoln died, Booth escaped only to be shot by Boston Corbett, America’s greatest eunuch.

But what happened to sockdologizing?

OED differs from other dictionaries in that it sleuths out word birthdays, the exact year when a word’s usage becomes widespread enough to earn inclusion.

For sockdolager, the year was 1830.

The last year its usage was cited -- and this is key -- was 1892.

How did this historically significant word drop so swiftly out of sight?

You’d think SportsCenter would find sensible reasons to use it at least once a show, sporting events being full of momentous sockdologizers.

Yet in a day when literacy was rare and news dissemination limited, this fancifully formed word -- much like flabbergast or ballyhoo -- stood up, marched straight into history and faded as quickly as the echo of a gunshot.

This should not stand. The anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination is fewer than four years away.

We need to muster a movement to increase sockdolager usage so the in-the-know crowd -- readers of this blog -- will nod sagely whenever we hear sockdolager and then get that little smarty-pants jolt of satisfaction when we inform listeners about sockdolager’s historic significance.

Oh, I can tell Josie’s going to be obnoxious about this.

I wonder where she gets that.

Alas, I tried to think of a really great sockdolager with which to conclude this post. I could not.

So the story that mentions 16 sockdolagers, probably more than in any other story written in the past 150 years, ends without one.