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Show of both him and the neighbor, turned down the offer. That he had raised kids who would choose play over work mortified him. Later that day, both his son and daughter apologized to the neighbor and offered to rake the lawn for free, but even that could not undo the gnawing fear his children would shame him with their complacency. He could not imagine a childhood where money failed to move. We never found ourselves footless and fancy-free. Not in sixty days on the road. We always seemed to be under some sort of deadline that made the open fields that freedom requires impossible to find. In New York, we dashed from one end of the city to the other trying to hit the highlights in two days: Monet's Water Lilies, the Staten Island Ferry, and Broadway. On our first day in the city, having raced to catch the last ferry to the Statue of Liberty, we discovered a line that snaked across an area the size of a football field. Apparently, others also had chosen the Fourth of July to see this universal symbol of welcome. For what seemed like hours we waited in line to ascend the stairs. We had missed lunch and had eaten breakfast around a small table in Connecticut when the sky was still dark. Suffocating with both hunger and the heat, we became separated in line, a large French family coming between my dad and me and my mother and two brothers. Right when my father and I reached the entrance to the stairs, a guard stepped in front of us with a large yellow sign and proclaimed the Statue closed. No more tourists, regardless of stature or strength of voice, would be allowed to scale her body. We could tour the pedestal, the guard suggested in the face of my dad's rage, and wait for the rest of our family to descend. 202 |
