But where was Lincoln’s log cabin?

I fussed as we circled round to the visitor’s center, hop­ing I’d find it tucked some­where. Of course, it wasn’t, as I later learned because it’s in Hodgeville, Kentucky, where he was born, now a living farm. How then could Hild­ene’s “Gilded Age” opulence fit into what I knew of Lincoln’s beginnings? I later realized that the contradiction between what I had just encountered and the kind of wealth I un­derstand took about half a century for Hildene to work out its way into it.

On a long narrow drive­way under giant cypresses that ended in an iron gate framing the slope of manicured grass, it’s this grand view that had riled me: an estate on a 412-acre sprawl of meadows, a white Georgian Revival man­sion looms against the Green Mountains and Equinox Summit in Manchester, Ver­mont. Built by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, he called it Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home.

Not having paid the fee to pass through the main drive­way, my friend and I merely prowled about the visitor’s center, a carriage barn once, flipping through Lincoln sou­venirs alongside handmade local products. From here, we couldn’t but peek through a massive iron-grill side gate at the mansion, awed childlike and mildly regretful of not walking up close to the formal parterre garden, where a thou­sand peonies, from the original cuts a granddaughter planted, had bloomed in the spring. As well, with proper timing, we could have sat through the music of the spheres from the 1,000-pipe Aeolian organ, a gift to Robert Lincoln, suppos­edly played daily, or climbed up his observatory both open to star gazers and astronomers.

Finding Hildene, I had thought of how descendants of self-made leaders like Lincoln, and closer to home, Diosda­do Macapagal, overturn what their fathers represent, namely, the value of humble origins. While this had been eroded by Macapagal’s daughter, Lin­coln’s son, in building Hildene from the wealth that came with his leadership of the-then Pull­man Company in the 1900s, unwittingly used it to propa­gate his father’s legacy in the end, hence, projecting the po­lar opposite of his father’s log cabin.

But it took me a week af­ter this visit to turn my view around. Today, the estate and mansion belongs not just to Americans but anyone will­ing to be engaged in living its extended life. If still a child, I could have attempted to catch a lamb’s somewhat sad and distant gaze among the grazing herds of goat and sheep ro­tated daily in the vast glen for greener grass not within our view that visit, or catch a sniff of cheese made year-round in a solar-run farm house, re­living President’s Abe love for animals and how he grew up working on the land.

Surely, though unquali­fied, I would have wanted to write an essay about what “I would like to change in the world,” a theme drawn from Lincoln’s monumental role in freeing slaves, and vie for a prize in a yearly contest sponsored by the Friends of Hildene, now running the estate and the programs as their “Mission of Values into Action.” Except for this contest and the farm, nothing much of the Abe I met in grade school, in a subject I can’t recall, moves about in Hildene, though a review of his life and presidency on film in­troduced us to the estate.

Not his but his son’s wealthy legacy, set against the vast landscape obvious­ly operates Hildene, touching young lives, enchanting adults and sending off one-time vis­itors like I was, with a huge onion of thought to peel. It’s obvious that I’m simplifying what’s really a more compli­cated thought than I perceive, hence, revealing my ignorance of the powers behind econom­ic engines. A cipher among billions of those who compose the working or once employed masses, all I know has to do with the reality I understand.

Most people like me can’t imagine how wealth in billions or even mere millions not only works but how it is used. And because the senses, especially of sight, weigh things from a judgment seat, what I’ve seen and heard had fortified my naïveté—in Manila, that is, where the wealthy exist in what to me, and many others, dodg­ing dust, as ethereal worlds walled-in both physically and socially.

Wealth that subtly brings about change in others’ worlds, that’s what I under­stand. But doesn’t any kind of wealth change worlds, or more significantly, lives? Easily, from recent upheav­als caused by the scramble for mind-boggling wealth, not only does the kind of riches we ordinarily aspire to gain has widened the gap between those who have and those who don’t, but it has also brought about disasters worse than calamities, such as losing one’s job and home, finding the nightmare of liv­ing on the streets, once mere­ly an episode on television news now one’s own, and flailing in a cobweb of endless uncertainty.

I hadn’t figured what size the onion I started to peel, prompted by a visit to Hild­ene, would be. But being a figurative thought, apparent­ly, it turns out to be immense.