Statue of Liberty

by Kirby Olson (May 2019)


Statue of Liberty, Peter Max

 

          We found a parking spot on the street at 78th and Broadway. My one skill as a driver is reverse parking. I slipped into the slot, just big enough for the van. Parking lots charge a minimum of thirty dollars for ten hours, so I always park on the street in New York City. I paid the Muni-meter 4 dollars with the credit card. An Asian doorman watched me pay for the meter, and take the slip to put on the dashboard.

          I looked at a blue sign amidst five other signs, and I thought that perhaps he was right. The arrow on the sign pointed the other way. The problem with signs in NYC is that there are so many they seem to cancel one another out. I often wondered if this was deliberate. If you get it wrong, you pay 200 dollars for an infraction.

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          I lost four dollars. We walked over to the Natural History Museum. It was two blocks, but a twenty-minute walk. The kid hates museums, but I wanted to interest Falstaff in the pygmy owl, and the lemurs, and the dinosaur bones, and the twilight displays of wolves in the Canadian north, and the cascade of butterflies that showed evolution in color and morphology between butterfly species. A life-size blue whale did catch his eye but only momentarily. Mari snapped pictures.   “Let’s eat!” The child cried.

          I was cagily planning to get us to the Statue of Liberty.

          We shot across the Queensborough Bridge and were in Queens, expecting to see signs to LaGuardia. I stopped and a Hispanic man at a gas station told me to ask his wife in the van how to get there.

          I went around to her side, it was 9 pm. She looked scared.

          The guy was eating a vegetarian hamburger, and dipping it in ketchup, wetting the corner of it, like a French Revolutionary tasting blood.

          Across the street on 112th is the old Labyrinth Books which is now Book Culture, because the original Labyrinth Books moved to Princeton. I bought the following books:

, by Amir Aczel, which is an account of Andrew Wiles’ breakthrough in terms of solving the obscure theory x to the nth power—y to the nth power = z to the nth has no whole number solution when n is greater than 2. It takes us back to mathematical developments in Babylon that help to explain the action in Princeton on June 23, 1993, when Wiles wrote out the answers for several hours explaining how he had finally solved the theorem which no one had been able to solve for three hundred years. True, but simplistic.

          We held hands and looked up the eighty feet at the blackened ceiling.

The ferry pushed through the choppy sea and Mari went to the bathroom.

          Falstaff pouted in the silence.

          We got out. The Statue was gigantic. It had been given to America by a committee of Frenchmen in the late 1800s under the direction of a French scholar of the American constitution—Edouard Laboulaye. Mari asked me why we were looking at it.

          Falstaff ran away through the crowd.

          I grabbed him around the middle and walked him toward Lady Liberty.

I spanked him.

          I set Falstaff down and he ran to his mother and glowered.

          I thought of freedom as a legal norm that America had sought to defend, and that it had ended up as freedom to shop. How could I take back the rights of a father, without stepping all over the new rights? This would take reflection.

 

 

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