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The Penny Mother
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
All copper is drawn to the Statue of Liberty, for she is the Penny Mother. The pilings under the Liberty Island ferry pier are covered in pennies that have leapt from the pockets of tourists, scuba divers, and bloated murder victims awaiting discovery in the Hudson. Every penny that we saw creeping toward a sewer grate on Manhattan Island was in mid-migration, and every wish made at a fountain launched a pilgrimage to the hem of her moss-green robes.
From the instant they are mined her children are pulled toward her. On the island that she calls home, should you choose to visit, you will find a monument to her personal magnetism. The monument is a rock that would seem quite unremarkable if it weren’t atop a pedestal on an otherwise featureless and well-manicured lawn. A plaque declares its origin to be Norwegian, its birthplace the same earth that produced the Lady’s own garments over a century ago. Can you imagine the longing that pulled this boulder from a decades-idle mine, the aching of its veins as it began its journey? Had the sailors on board the Norwegian freighter not had the the foresight to line the bulkheads with spare mattresses and blankets, they all might have ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic — first the ore through the hole it ripped in the hull, followed by the ship herself. But we know this was not the case. The Norwegians were rewarded for their ingenuity with a leisurely glide to the New World, and the engines were only stoked to navigate around the occasional iceberg or sea-turtle that drifted between their vessel and their destination.
It had been hard not to think about death on the way to New York. My wife is afraid of flying. I told her once that her fear was irrational and she replied that an airplane crash would involve pain and be followed in most cases by death, and that it is quite rational to fear either of these things. I’m a pretty good flyer myself, but the fears of the people you love, even the irrational fears, tend to be contagious. We wheeled over Woodlawn Cemetery, low enough to count the rows without quite being able to make out the individual monuments. And then we watched the blue-grey blur of the harbour beneath us for more than a little too long before it became the asphalt runway. And finally, on the ground and in retrospect, my preoccupation seemed more than trite, yet less than juvenile.
Still, a sombre mood loomed over our vacation, as it was a vacation postponed. This was the trip that the four of us, including my wife and two friends from England, had planned to take not quite two years earlier. Our plans were quite advanced, to the point of a car being packed and sandwiches half-prepared on a warm Tuesday morning in September. But then at the last possible moment they changed, and instead we watched the news for eight hours or so — my wife, for the first few, with butter-knife still in hand — until we could watch no more, and we piled into the car to head off in an entirely different direction under a blue and silent sky.
Only two killings that we knew of occurred while we were in New York. Councilman James Davis was shot by political rival Othniel Askew on the council chamber balcony at City Hall on the afternoon of our arrival, and Askew was felled shortly thereafter by a police officer firing from the chamber floor. We unpacked in our hotel room to the sound of Mayor Bloomberg’s subsequent press conference, which played on the community cable channel at regular intervals through the day and into the evening. But by evening we had left our room for the anonymity of the crowded Manhattan streets.
Much of our vacation involved the city that we remembered. Our younger, fitter travelling companions led us on a frenzied and unremitting exploration of stores and museums in late-July air so moist and hot that cool, conditioned air tumbling out of an open shop door would slow our frenetic pace to a dreamy shuffle. We milled around a location shoot for a popular television series on Mulberry, and were descended upon by a six-man international speed-feeding team at a nearby restaurant who only relented when we started sending back entire courses that we hadn’t ordered. We snapped pictures of each other on the Staten Island ferry while Manhattan unfolded behind us like a child’s pop-up book.
But part of our visit was not to the city that I remembered, as if I had been reunited with an old friend and was trying not to notice a recent scar. Legislation had been passed that year banning smoking in bars, and in contrast to my experience in Toronto from a few years earlier, New Yorkers offered little resistance. I expressed surprise to one of our hosts, and he replied simply, “I guess there wasn’t much fight left.” I stepped outside for a cigarette, and saw a flag that had become tangled in the razor wire garnishing the construction site next door. I climbed onto a bench and took a picture over the heads of the crowd, but when I looked at the shot later it didn’t say anything that I wanted it to say.
Travelling is the opposite of dreams in some ways. In dreams you meet people you know, and you know who they are in spite of the fact that their faces may may be completely different. When you travel, you see faces that only look familiar, but are really the faces of strangers. New York is even less like my dreams now; I want to see family in those faces, to claim that I am drawn to her because I am one of her children. But that isn’t true either.