Thought inspired by Lincoln's birthday

Becoming older has provided me with interesting ties with the past. On Lincoln's birthday, I remembered that D's great-grandmother Whippple, whom I first met when she was 100 (and alert enough to place me in her family), said that when she was a child she saw Lincoln's funeral train as it came through Illinois. I wasn't born until 70 years after that event, but it is real to me thru a person I knew.