The Presidential Placemat

I (once again) have packed far too early and am sitting here with absolutely nothing substantive with which to entertain myself. I guess I'll just talk about The Presidential Placemat.

I have no idea where my mother found the many strange (but all somehow educational) placemats of my childhood that we still have stuffed into our pantry. They all miraculously appeared and disappeared beneath our breakfasts every morning, gleaming dully under the yellowed kitchen table plastic in the light of the $25 Tiffany lamp. Every bleary-eyed morning was spent staring sightlessly at these placemats as they paraded by under our eggs and sausages. There was one with a map of the United States plastered on one side in truly alarming colors. Little black dashes took the place of the state names. Flip it over and little black dashes replaced the capital names.

Our placemats appeared to be on permanent rotation until one day, I noticed that my placemat hadn't changed in several weeks. I stared. Forty-two white dudes stared back with varying amounts of animosity.

Such was the advent of The Presidential Placemat.

Every morning at breakfast, I'd stare at the presidents. I decided that William Henry Harrison did look rather frail. Taft did look large enough to get stuck in a bathtub. I learned every president's first, middle, and last name. After a while, though, the beady eyes began to creep me out. One day, I took the placemat and flipped it over. Over the years, I've read every little box at least a dozen times during tense meals at the kitchen table.

Off the top of my head, I remember that Franklin Pierce was responsible for Matthew C. Perry's trip to Japan, that Buchanan was the only unmarried president (interesting, that), and that there is a punctuation error in the little box talking about John Quincy Adams that has never failed to darken my foul mood.

I didn't realize how much of that information I'd somehow assimilated through this strange form of breakfast hypnopaedia until I took AP U.S. History during my junior year in high school. Some things I just knew. Most of it was really strange, useless information. Like how short James Madison was. But others were important. Whenever people think about presidential assassination, they think about Lincoln. Or JFK.

Were Garfield and McKinley so unimportant?

I thought it was common knowledge. Apparently not. The Presidential Placemat hurled me into a strange world of unconscious knowledge from unconscious learning. Of course Benjamin Harrison was William Henry Harrison's grandson. Of course John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826. It all made sense.

Strangely enough, The Presidential Placemat made me realize that learning was everything all the time. Whether unconscious or not, some part of whatever it is that I'm doing ends up sticking in my head for better or for worse. That's both exhilarating and terrifying.

The Presidential Placemat is in my dorm room, resting up against my bookshelf. I'm not entirely sure why I asked my mother to bring it to me, but it's here to stay. It's a sort of childhood relic. Old, familiar, comfortable. I still leave the forty-two white dudes face down, though. I can't stand the accusation.