American Dream

The Statue of Liberty is one of the most popular tourist sites in the United States and one I had somehow managed to avoid in my first 60 years on the planet. On the last week of the summer, it would be the main attraction of a 3 day junket to New York City. My wing man for that journey is Alex, age 6. The Eiffel Tower from the previous summer in France got in his head an excitement about gigantically tall tourist traps, and the weekend we spent in the Lower East Side for Suzanne’s birthday two summers before had cemented New York in his mind to be the most thrilling and enchanting place a kid could be.  At home in Boston, there is no such gargantuan landmark. We have the Bunker Hill Monument I suppose, but for goodness sake, it’s an obelisk.  Besides commemorating one of the most important occasions in American history, it also stands for Bostonians complete lack of imagination. I suppose Mount Rushmore will get on his bucket list at some point.  Maybe the Washington Monument. Maybe there are some cool obelisks in Egypt he’ll want to check out.

Anyway, I tried my luck playing Airbnb roulette and got what I was led to believe to be a nice, little, one bedroom apartment back in the Lower East Side. As it turned out, the apartment was not located in the center of the circle on the map from the AirBnB webpage that circumscribed what I imagined to be a neighborhood like Holly Golightly’s in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Instead, it was a few blocks to the south.  Chinatown. What a difference a few blocks make in New York City. Chinatown is the smelliest place in America. It would seem that every morning, business owners start the day by smearing rotten cat food and 5 day old dead squirrel on the sidewalk in front of their shops to bake all day in the hot summer sun. It makes you wonder what China smells like if the tired, poor huddled masses from there came here to breathe free. Anyway, I pulled together a plan for 3 days in New York to see Lady Liberty and some other filler activities. So, I thought.

The morning after we arrived in town we went down to the sea-washed, sunset gates where we crowded on board the ferry to visit the Mother of Exiles.  It seemed logical to me the company that runs the excursions from Battery Park out to The Colossus would throw in a stop at Ellis Island, it being basically in the path of the ferry.  To me, it was a perfunctory stop at the place where poor people from foreign lands were herded through to be processed by the appropriate bureaucracy before being admitted into the country; a tourist attraction that sounded a lot like the Registry of Motor Vehicles. My grandfather had immigrated to this country from Italy and came through Ellis Island so the place had a bit more meaning for me than the rest of the folks that had no choice but to purchase the New York version of the tourist Happy Meal. 

No tempest would toss us on that stunning August morning as we cut through the modest waves, cruising across the formerly air-bridged harbor for the main event of our mini-vacation that was taken mostly to kill time during the week between Alex’s summer camps, and the first week of first grade. As I was not working at the time, it was my job to care for and entertain the lad. No small task in this age of 52 weeks a year structured programming for children. Long gone are the days when summer moved like continental drift, when if we said the word “bored” to my mother, her almost always gentle and pleasant face would become possessed and spew saliva as she screamed at us to get out of the house while she contended with the 13th consecutive year of sleep deprivation brought on by having 6 children and working night shift at a local electronics distributor. “Bored” must of sounded like heaven to her.  For Alex, all he knows is hour by hour time plans that include activities such as “kid’s choice”, “circle time”, gym, recess, lunch, snack, and more “kids’ choice”. If an hour were to come without a plan, his eyes would start spinning wildly in their sockets and his tongue waggle uncontrollably as his head would shake from side to side. If it were to happen on this trip it would be a total failure and perhaps the last time Wing and I travel alone.

The Statue of Liberty on a hot, sunny, bright blue-sky day is even more majestic and huge and beautiful than a 6 year old mind could possibly imagine it to be. As you approach it, the statue slowly grows in your field of vision until it becomes something like the brazen giant of Greek fame that she is not.  And that is really the best part of the visit; approaching Liberty Island with this statue growing until its full size reduces you to awestruck. However, when you finally land and get to walk around the statue, it becomes a Grand Canyon moment. Like Niagara Falls. Or the Eiffel Tower. Something you might have seen all your life in school text books, on the side of a U-Haul, in cartoons, or on someone’s obnoxious Facebook feed, but once there, the anticipated feeling of awe swiftly gives way to the thought that, well, there it is, what now?  But she certainly is awesome, and so after staring at it for 2 minutes we were ready to move on.

Sometimes, like at the big falls, or the Cadillac Ranch, or the Baseball Hall of Fame, it is hard to find a good follow up activity nearby as there is a huge drop off in interest from the main event to the side show. But the package deal in New York made the decision of what to do next easy, so we reboarded the ferry for the short trip to Ellis which was long enough for us to hear a tour guide standing within ear shot explain something about the island really being part of New Jersey. Or something like that. Having taken the tourist boat at home up and down the Charles River many times, I know guides tell some very interesting stories that are historically suspect.  But more importantly, the trip is quick enough to keep things interesting for the little wing who just checked a major box on his list of life aspirations and was ready for the next one.  I could already see his eyes twitching slightly and the tip of his tongue protruding somewhat from the side of his mouth. The pressure to keep him from getting bored and wanting to go home to Mommy was starting to build.

 Approaching the dock on the island was when I first thought of Antonio, a young man from Grotte Sicily in 1923, landing at the same dock, and what he might have been thinking. My guess is that he was not scared or anxious as the people that are the focus of the stories that are told on the tour of the site. At age 25, just a few years past his days fighting the Austrians in the war, I imagine it was an adventure to him, and that he was excited for a chance to live with his older brother again and work together in the steel mills of Steubenville Ohio. A chance to get out of poor little backwards Grotte and away from the tiny patch of dirt that was his farm and would provide subsistence for the rest of his life. A chance to perhaps become an American.

He would return to Sicily only twice. The first trip was to get married. Both times he left his wife pregnant as he returned to America to work and save money so that someday maybe the whole family could move there. It was during the year of his second visit back to the old country that the Depression hit, and it would be another six years before he saved the money and made the decision to move his wife and now two grown boys to their new home.

When we disembarked at Ellis it was lunchtime so we found a shady spot on a bench and ate the Fluffernutter sandwiches I made that morning back in Stinkville. That there was a time when even the buildings used to process the wretched refuse of some far-off teeming shore were beautifully architected gives the feeling that America was a very different place back then.  The main building on the island is surprisingly well preserved since the days it was used for processing someone else’s tired and poor and Alex and I toured the place led by our wearable audio tour guides, his narrated by a kid, mine an adult, but each telling basically the same immigrant story of hope and faith that this new place would be better than the home they just left.  The voices tell us to walk over to station 12, a spot with a few rows of benches upon which Wingie seized the opportunity to take a load off of his short skinny legs. The voices in our headsets told us that the new arrivals would have sat on these benches waiting for their turn to be interrogated and examined for tuberculosis and diphtheria and even given an eye exam with a button hook used to turn their eyelids inside out looking for trachoma, and that some of the benches, the dark ones, are the real benches dating back to those olden days. And as those words were being quietly spoken into our ears, my eyes gaze set on Antonio’s youngest great-grand son stretched out upon that darkened bench, and I felt a fire light in the back of my neck and move upward, engulfing my face and squeezing tears from my eyes as I looked at my beautiful young son, who has every advantage a human could ask for in 2019 because someone had the American dream, and I thought of a younger version of the grandfather I knew, escaping poverty for a better life, if you can believe it, working in a steel mill in 1920’s America, and that possibly, he sat on the same bench.

Back on the mainland, trying to decode the bus schedule while urgently flipping through Yelp to find a kid friendly restaurant for my soon to be famished charge had me flustered, overcome with the fear that he would turn on me at any moment and accuse me of being a horrible tour guide or even worse, a terrible travel buddy. Deeper and deeper into Yelp I descended. As a stream of sweat from the top of my head dribbled down the side of my face, and to Alex pretending to have the situation in total control, and that more fun was coming our way, I was approached by a young man in a royal blue tee shirt whose summer job apparently was to help tourists avoid panic attacks as they entertain their families. “Can I help you with anything?”  I saw he was skilled at recognizing panic. “No. I’m all set” I lied as he peered at me through half squinted eyes, his upper lip curled like a fish’s snagged by a hook. “You have something on your lip” he said as he touched his own face on the spot I was supposed to wipe on mine. I brushed my finger across my lip and removed a pea sized blob of Marshmallow Fluff. “You got it” he said as his eyes went back to full size and his lip relaxed, then slowly turned and walked back to the team of Blue shirts he had been laughing with before he spied my sweaty head. “How long was that on my face?” I asked Alex. “I don’t know, I didn’t notice it”. That would make sense I guess, as his eyes are more or less belly button height on me, and what is happening on my face is about as apparent to him as what is happening on the roof of our house is to me.  I finally located a diner that was open in Tribeca and off to dinner we went.

It was much later, back in our Chinatown pad, after I put Alex to bed, that I thought about another boy, Alex’s age, on his first boat ride, cruising into the same harbor in 1937 and beholding the mighty woman with a torch, getting his first sight of the land that will become his new home, as she lifted her lamp to the golden door. At age 88 Gus still remembers that day, and the stewards aboard the SS Rex explaining who she was as he arrived at his new country, age 6, and being greeted first by the big green statue, and moments later by Antonio, his father, my grandfather,  Alex’s great-grandfather, for the very first time.