Dalai Mama Blog

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

The children have $5 each to spend in the gift shop. Ben fingers a green foam crown, studies a commemorative box of mints with his name printed on it, and compares two miniature models of the statue, one plain and one decked out with Christmas garlands. Birdy flickers a torch-shaped flashlight. They've already been waiting in various lines all day, and it's not even noon yet. They're hot and tired and hungry: they want to ogle souvenirs and then eat more cashews in the shade with their grandparents and cousins; they need to pee; they wish good-naturedly that they had enough money to buy the model and the mints, though Birdy is indignant that there are no tins with her name on them ("Birdy is, obviously, a name," she argues). Later they will debate whether their favorite part of the day was the ferry ride or the "puffer" - the blast of air that inflates all your clothing while you're going through security so that they can check...what? I don't even know. Whether your skirt is concealing a federal excess of cellulite, perhaps. (Luckily they let me through anyways.)

All day, here at the Statue of Liberty, and later at Ellis Island, I say to them Imagine...Imagine that you've been on a boat for weeks, ill and anxious perhaps, and then suddenly you're sailing into the harbor and see that statue! Imagine that all your worldly possessions are sewn up in a rug and you arrive here, the statue a promise of freedom, like an oasis that you're crawling towards! Wow my privileged American kids say obediently. That must have been scary! That must have been amazing! I read to them the end of Emma Lazarus' famous sonnet:

Nobody's especially listening. I want them to experience the complex symbolism of the statue, I want them to grasp something, only I'm not sure exactly what it is. I don't even know how to feel myself. I, also, want more cashews. I'm cynical and also in love with the very ideals the statue stands for. If the lavender Liberty babydoll t-shirts weren't $30, I would think about getting one. I wish France still loved us enough to give us a 204-ton gift that took 16 years to make (it's impossible to picture France making us even, say, an origami frog). I am moved by the ideals of democracy and the practice of freedom. I can't get the Schoolhouse Rock noun song out of my head: "I took a ferry to the Statue of Liberty..." I'm still laughing about Ben, who can't believe how big the statue is. ("I thought," he confesses, "that it would be life-sized.") I am filled with despair about war, about hypocrisy. Imagine I don't say to the kids visiting the Statue of Liberty today after your daughter has just been deported to Mexico, to Syria. "Do you think any restaurant has ever served a dish called 'Frank Si-Nachos?'" Michael wonders aloud, a propos of nothing. "I'm going to Google it when we get home." This is life.

We watch a film that recreates the construction of the statue's big toe. The intricacy and scale are mind-boggling: the sequence of wood models and plaster molds, the acres of copper hammered out and riveted first to a web of iron supports and then to a complicated internal scaffolding designed by none other than Gustave Eiffel - I'm hot and tired and there are heaps of laundry to do at home, and I cannot imagine taking on this project. I barely have the energy to clip my own toenails. "Oh my God!" I picture myself saying in 1872. "We've only done one toe so far? Forget it." The passion and vision behind the material fact of the statue are as moving as anything.

Later, at Ellis Island, I will try to explain to Ben how the promise of freedom sometimes turned out to be a false promise. My brother will look for our Russian grandmother's name on the registry of immigrants. We will study the display of tablecloths and linens, silverware and musical instruments - the precious few treasures that people chose to bring with them - and I will imagine my own mother arriving here on a boat from England with her grandmother's sewing machine in a steamer trunk. "Can you imagine," I will say in various moments to my brother, to my sister-in-law, to Michael and my parents, "Can you imagine being on the boat, hungry and filthy and filled with uncertainty, filled with hope and dread, only your kids are watching, so you smile, and break crackers into pieces, and sing your lullabies from home?"

I won't know that in less than two hours we will be sardined into my parents' elevator - all ten of us tired and hot and hungry, longing to lie down and gulp a glass of ice water and enjoy a little personal space, plus an eleventh, the elevator operator here from Poland not long enough yet to speak much English. And the elevator will arrive at the 16th floor, and the door will open, and what we will see will be the inside of the elevator shaft. Because the elevator will be stuck between floors. And the kids will be clutching their little Liberty models, and my mother will close her eyes gently while the elevator operator speaks hushed Polish into the elevator telephone, and the door will finally close and then open again, only it will still be the inside of the elevator shaft, and I will picture us plummeting to our deaths, sharing this oddly intimate family experience with the nervously shrugging elevator operator. I won't sing "Amazing Grace" because, on the off chance we survive, I will never hear the end of it from my half-Jewish family of immigrant atheists. But I will feel the blood start to leave my brain - a graying around the edges of my consciousness, even though I will need to faint upright - until Ben will tip his head back to look at me with his panicked animal eyes and ask, "Is it okay, Mama?" And I will say calmly, like the millions of parents before me who were brave and worried and willing it to be true, "Oh sweetheart, it's going to be fine."