There’s something we live with every moment of our lives. We use it constantly and so do the people we meet. I’m referring to our blessed language. On occasion we even use it in our sleep. It’s always a challenge. It can bring out our very best and sometimes the worst in us – the “better angels of our nature” or the opposite.

When I attended the weekly luncheon meeting of Rotary International in Hong Kong (a Chinese language city) it was conducted in English. The same held true in Bangkok, Thailand. When I attended one in Paris, France, the speakers used French, but the eight Frenchmen who sat with me spoke fluent English. I, on the other hand, was unable to converse with them in French even though I still have vestiges of a smattering from my two years of college French dating back to the 1930s. Eighty percent of international phone calls are in English. In Japan, kids start studying English in the first grade. In short, English has become the language of commerce and intercourse. The language of the English-speaking world is the greatest tool for the free exchange of thoughts and ideas.

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I like to write about pictures and boy have I got a picture for you! Just stop and look at it. That worldly weary, pensive face is Abraham Lincoln’s. Our newly elected President, Barack Obama, says it asks him questions. Does it ask you any? Do you have answers for this picture?

No doubt in my mind. George Washington was our greatest president. The job description was designed for him. But Abraham Lincoln was our most interesting. Almost 15,000 books have been written about him. (Did you absorb that? Almost 15,000 books have been written about him! How many of us have had 15 books written about us?)

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Mythology and facts get jumbled when you puzzle out the original landing by the English Pilgrims at the Plymouth area of Massachusetts. Let’s let it go as Nov. 11, 1620, on Plymouth Rock. They were English passenger settlers on the good ship Mayflower en route from the Netherlands. There were 102 of them and half of them died that first New England winter. That’s a pretty good description of a disaster as had almost been the case at Jamestown, Va., 13 years earlier.

But both these pioneering ventures survived the succeeding years. British explorers of the early 17th century were implacable.

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Sixteen years ago we spent our last night in Israel at Tel Aviv because that’s where the airport is. We had an early flight next morning. Tel Aviv is Israel’s bustling business city and is right on the Mediterranean Sea. Our hotel faced the beach and the sea around which most of Western civilization was born untold centuries ago. Around its periphery were the lands of Pharaohs, Moses, Jesus, Socrates, Aristotle, the Caesars. And Babylon. And Mohammed.

In the late afternoon, our group gathered under the beach umbrellas and looked at these waters of myth and legend, me barefoot in my swimming trunks. I don’t sit still long so I left Jacqueline and the others for the water’s edge, turned left and started walking up the beach just as I would at Hilton Head Island.

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“Lord help me to believe in beginnings, to make a beginning, to be a beginning so that I may not just grow old, but grow new each day to this wild amazing life you call me to live.”

There are 44 sounds in the English language, but only 26 letters in the alphabet.

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Accompanying this column is a reproduction of a picture of the King of Thailand (formerly Siam) the like of which you may never see again. I’ve never seen one and my wife and I spent a couple of weeks in his country about 40 years ago when neither he nor his picture appeared in public. He’s 80 years old now and they’re kicking up a legal fuss because some local woman made a disparaging remark about him. Since he’s so deified, that can put her in prison for a while. He’s not pressing any charges and doesn’t give a hoot, but somebody does, hence the news story.

All this set my memory train rumbling about how we got to Thailand and what we did there. It’s a lovely oriental country in Southeast Asia. Chinese-type people migrated south and west down there a thousand or so years ago and gradually evolved into a Siamese nationhood who prefer now to call themselves Thais (pronounced “ties”). They live in a constitutional monarchy named Thailand. In their capital of Bangkok, we stayed in what was called “the greatest hotel in the world,” the Oriental, with a view out over the river and passing boats. I’m not putting on airs, but that is where Joyce Ju put us and she was a smart operator. She was our Chinese-American travel guide.

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When Franklin Roosevelt started Social Security, the average male life expectancy was 59. Now it’s 79 and escalating. And women live even longer.

The tens of million of retired folks in the United States can become South Carolina’s greatest potential bonanza; widows, widowers, couples. And their income and assets average higher than the population at large. (I include a significant portion of minorities here). Sure there are millions of poor old people but they receive tremendous financial help from government and, as a consequence, are better off as well. In the old days, their children were expected to care for them.

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“Every saint has a past: Every sinner has a future.”

“Everyone is entitled to own opinion but not own facts.” – Moynihan

President Calvin Coolidge was famous for his taciturnity. One morning of a Sunday he left Mrs. Coolidge at home in the White House and went across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church for Sunday worship. When he returned, she asked how the service had been. He said, “Fine.” She asked what the sermon was about. He said, “Sin.” She said, “Well, what about it?” He said he was against it.

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When the glorious era of the Founding Fathers tapered off with the elderly deaths of Washington (1799); Adams (1826); Jefferson (1826); Madison (1836); Monroe (1831); we entered the age of the influence of Andrew Jackson – 1815 to 1848.

If he were alive today, Jackson would have been horrified by a Federal Reserve Bank and our new overflowing plan to buy our way out of the fiscal straits we’re in because of the way we’ve run our monetary affairs. He was president from 1829-1837, but his powerful influence was pervasive before and after.

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When you write about William Shakespeare, you use superlatives. The greatest of all writers of English. The greatest writer of anything. The largest vocabulary, the user of most words — 25,000, 40 percent of which he made up himself. He lived in a period (1564-1616 — 52 years) of linguistic ferment with splendid, creative writing in the air — Marlowe, Ben Jonson, the King James translation of the Bible.

He wrote splendid drama and poetry. He created the Shakespearean sonnet.

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