The Giant Green Lady

"What difference if I hail,
From North or South?
Or from the East or West?
My heart is filled with love
For all of these.
I only know I swell with pride
And deep within my breast,
I thrill to see Old Glory paint the breeze."

I remember hearing a rendition of This Is My Country, sung by the Army band (or was it the Air Force? Or the Marines?--well, some branch of the military when it was all male voices anyway), and feeling an upswell of emotion. I don't think I'm sloppily patriotic. I see the things my country does or at least some of its people and I am appalled. But it is such a big place, America. It has room for both good and bad, rich and poor, noble and ignoble. It has so much. And it symbolizes so much as well. What brought this on, you are probably asking. Or to poke fun at my blog readership, is anybody asking?

Anyway, hubby and I took a day trip to see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. I've never been there although it is only a couple of hours away. I've been to New York City a bunch of times and for heaven's sake, it's just across the river! But for one reason or another, neither one of us had been. We bought tickets on line, picked a time to take a tour and arrived with five minutes to spare. You have to stand in line to be screened, similar to the airport. As you stand in line you can look to your right and see the tall green lady with the uplifted arm and she seems not as big as you had imagined. To the left of the screening tent you see an incongruous sight, though. The shell of the railroad tracks which took those millions of immigrants to their destinations is there surrounded by chain link fence. A massive building which I assume is the place where currency was exchanged, train schedules were posted and the final leg of the long, long journey was at hand. I only assume as it was being refurbished and we only had so much time so we couldn't check it out. The incongruity though, was the New York City skyline immediately across the water from this place. Rising from the Hudson, jagged buildings and blocks of concrete straining up, the image of modern city life juxtaposed with the place of history--where we came from--where we are going? I don't know. It just struck me, especially upon seeing the new skyscraper place where the Twin Towers used to be.

You take a ferry to Ellis Island, the place where all immigrants were "processed". It is a massive U shaped set of structures. The building on the right was the first stop where you were determined to be either accepted or rejected into the new land. If rejected, we learned, the ship who transported you here had to take you back where you first boarded. It wasn't an option, that was the way it worked. The conditions of the voyage didn't' make going back a particularly encouraging prospect. The buildings on the left were the dormitories, hospital, and other facilities if there was a wait for your processing. Hubby and I kept asking ourselves, "what would that have been like?" Coming to a new place where no one spoke your language, where you frequently didn't have any relatives or anyone to meet you. You didn't know how you would make a living, or even where you would live. That sense of bewilderment overridden by the sense of hope that this place could be the start of a new life. I can't imagine it, really. I tried all day, but it just seems too big, too different from my life now.