As I typed the previous
page, I listened to the West Los Angeles
Children's Choir singing and speaking the words of
poet Emma Lazarus' famous sonnet, The New
Colossus. She wrote it in 1883 to sell at an
auction to raise money to build the pedestal on
which the Statue of Liberty would stand. The
statue itself, which Lazarus referred to in her
sonnet as Mother of Exiles, was a gift
from the people of France, as most of us learned
in school. American donors only had to raise
money to pay for the platform.
The New Colossus was not famous until after
Emma Lazarus, a descendant of early Sephardic
Jewish Americans, died in 1887 when she was only
38 years old. In 1901, a friend found the
poem. Two years later, it was inscribed on a
plaque for the Statue's pedestal. I was intrigued
by this woman, and sidetracked myself to read part
of the biography of the woman whose words have
been taught to generations of American school
children, including me. Because she was born into
a wealthy family, she was privileged to receive a
classical education denied to the majority of
young girls of her time. Her family moved in high
society and owned a mansion in Newport, Rhode
Island. Emma once sent a sample of her writing to
Ralph Waldo Emerson who was so impressed by her
talent that he became her pen pal and mentor.
I was curious about why Emma Lazarus
chose to call her Petrarchan sonnet The New
Colossus. Was there an "old" Colossus? And
what was a Colossus anyway ? Time for dictionary.com,
a site I keep open on my 2nd monitor most of the
time. Colossus was defined as any statue of
gigantic size. However, when it was used with an
initial capital letter, it was defined as the
legendary bronze statue of Helios at
Rhodes. More research needed, and this is
where I got off on a delightful tangent, cementing
my nickname, CP, short for Curious Priscilla.
I
must remind myself again, right here and now, of
the wise words of Dr. Joel Friedman, a former
holistic physician in Gainesville who moved to
Hawaii. He taught me that everything we
do, we do for ourselves. It took me twenty
years to understand that and to fully embrace the
freedom it allowed me to give myself
the best.gift.ever. - to be my most
authentic self I know how to be at any given
moment. Regarding this book of memories, I realize
I am writing it for
myself, and if my children, grandchildren,
and great-grandchildren choose to read it, they
will know who Mom/G-ma really is, or was, at a
deeper level. The older ones already know I
never wanted to be remembered as a Norman Rockwell
cookie-baking grandma, not that there's anything
wrong with that if that's your choice. I respect
that. I want my oldest grandson, Richard Carter,
to remember me instead as G-ma G who taught him
how to create his own website on AOL when he
was seven.
An
autobiography is a life review, after all, and
this is my very own. I revel in all the tangents,
twists, and turns my story takes. When I look back
on my life, I want to hear Frank Sinatra
singing, I did it my way. My wish for
you is that you do it your way and know that
all the answers you seek are within yourself.
Back
to Helios, the sun god. Collins English
Dictionary named Helios at Rhodes as one
of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, right
up there with the Pyramids of Egypt and the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Holy cow! How
is that masked reference connected to our Statue
of Liberty? The Colossus of Rhodes was built on
the Greek island of Rhodes between 292 and 280
BC. It was meant to celebrate the victory over
the ruler of Cyprus in 305 BC. The statue was
destroyed in antiquity by an earthquake. Encyclopedia.com
gives us a reality check when it writes:
According to legend . . .
it stood astride the harbor and ships passed
between its legs. In reality, it stood on a
promontory overlooking the harbor. .
."
The
English literature instructor, Joshua Wimmer, in
his brief synopsis of The New Colossus wrote
about the author,
She opens the piece by
contrasting the intimidating and ancient
Colossus of Rhodes with the new colossal
figure of a mighty woman who cordially
greets all those who enter New York
Harbor...as she draws more contrasts between
America and the Old World.
All of this drew my mind back to a school
field trip when I was young. We were taken to see
Lady Liberty and got to walk up the stairs inside
the statue as far up as they would let us go. We
were not allowed to enter the crown or the torch
then. The tour guide told us it was due to an act
of sabotage by spies during World War I.
Recently, I read that visitors can go all the way
up to the crown now with a $21 reserve ticket.
I was excited and upset at the same time when our
class went to see the Lady Liberty. I hadn't
realized how long it would take a large group of
people to slowly climb the stairs inside the
statue. I was excited to be inside that symbol of
hope that greeted all four of my grandparents as
they entered New York Harbor and approached Ellis
Island. I imagined tears rolling down my
grandmothers' faces as they remembered all the
relatives and friends they had to leave behind in
Italy in order to risk a new life in a country
where they didn't speak the language.
I was upset because the inside walls of the
statue, close enough to touch if you leaned way
over the railing, were totally covered with
graffiti, much of it written with red lipstick.
There was a lot of profanity written
in red that was usually reserved for bathroom
walls, balanced by lipstick hearts announcing to
the world that Mary loved John. I was glad my
grandparents didn't get to go inside the statue to
see that some American kids had not learned
respect and defiled public property. They'd see
that soon enough.
The guide told us "Statue of Liberty" was just her
nickname. The sculptor, Frederic Bartholdi, named
her Liberty Enlightening the World. We
were surprised to learn that the seven spikes on
the crown aren't really part of the crown. They're
actually supposed to be a halo. I felt sure our
teacher was pleased that we were expanding our
knowledge of U.S. history. All in all, It was one
of those days in your life that you never forget.
As I reminisced about that long ago day, thoughts
of other field trips our teachers carefully
planned for us made me appreciate how fortunate I
was to grow up in culture-rich New York City. Our
school trips took us to places many people never
get to see in a lifetime. We took them for granted
as we took our permission slips home for our
parents to sign for our next outing. Classmates
who were a year or so ahead of us told us the
teachers had a formal list of places to take us.
Before we were graduated from Ten Eyck - Junior
High School 196 on Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, we
would have all gone on field trips to the same
wonderful places.
Eventually our field trip took us to the Empire
State Building. It was built four years before I
was born and at that time it was the first
building to have more than 100 storeys, or floors.
From 1931 to 1973, it held the record for the
highest observation deck in the world since the
Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. The
highlight of the trip for us was the observation
deck on the 102nd floor. Through the telescopes up
there, on a clear day it looked like you really
could see forever.
Another favorite trip was to the out-of-this-world
Hayden Planetarium where we could watch a movie, a
sky show with a tiny dot that represented Earth.
It really put things in perspective. The American
astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author, Neil
deGrasse Tyson, has been the Frederic P. Rose
Director of the Hayden Planetarium since 1996. His
current TV show, Star Talk is educational
as well as entertaining. It's one of my favorites.
We were also taken to the New York Public Library
(NYPL) at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in
Manhattan. If you are a bibliophile, or just love
libraries the way that I do, you would love the
NYPL, the second largest public library in the
United States, second only to the Library of
Congress. NYPL has almost 53 million items. Their
Project Gutenberg contains 52,313 ebooks and
kindle books you may read free of charge
online or you may download them. See
www.gutenberg.org. A quote from one of their
books, The Library, caught my eye. The
author Andrew Lang wrote,
The bibliophile
asks about his books
the
question
which
the
metaphysician
asks about
his
soul.
The Library adopted as
its mascots, the world-renowned Tennessee
marble lions, known as Patience and Fortitude.
Those were not their original names. They were
renamed by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia for the
qualities he felt New Yorkers would need to
survive the Great Depression. They have been
guarding the entrance since the Library was
dedicated in 1911. Patience sits on the south
side of the main steps and Fortitude sits to
the north. I treasure the replica bookends of
those lions that were given to me by a dear
friend of our family, the late Bob Meade. His
gifts always reflected my current interest at
the time. Later, when I was getting into all
things Egyptian, he asked me if I would shop
for an ankh ring for a young woman who worked
with him at Eckerd Drugs on University Avenue.
He added, and get the jeweler to make one
for you, too! He was such fun and full
of surprises. Thanks, Bob.
When we were taken to The Cloisters, we were told
that tourists often missed this unique museum.
It's located in Upper Manhattan and specializes in
European medieval art, much of it mystical and
religious, out of a Catholic tradition.
Around the time I was born, parts of five French
monasteries and abbeys were excavated and
reconstructed in New York City. That was the
beginning of The Cloisters in the Washington
Heights area of Fort Tryon Park, with a lovely
view of the Hudson River. The park was
commissioned by the well-known philanthropist,
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. When the park was
finished, he donated it to New York City.
It was like a trip to the
Middle Ages, not my favorite time in history. I
was fascinated by the 500-year-old Unicorn
Tapestries I had only seen in a book at my
library on Devoe Street in Brooklyn. I had never
seen anything like this museum before. It is now
part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met).
I don't think I had ever seen real columns before,
except in books. I didn't like some of the
capitals with their grotesque faces. I made a
mental note to have two columns in my house when I
grew up and got married. It didn't happen, but I
have loved columns since that day.
Gordon loved columns, too, and had a strong
preference for the ornate Corinthian capitals.
When we went to Rome, he was like a kid in a candy
store at the Pantheon, the best preserved building
from Ancient Rome. It was completed around 125 CE
in the reign of Hadrian with its columns and
famous dome, the largest un-reinforced dome in the
world. Steps of Numidian yellow marble extended
from its base but I don't remember if they still
exist. I was having more fun watching Gordon enjoy
that day and the porch colonnade that had eight
Corinthian columns. But I digress once more and
have saved my favorite school trip for the last.
My absolutely, without a doubt, personal favorite
field trip was to the American Museum of Natural
History.
That's where I first saw
an ancient sarcophagus in the Egyptian room.
It was an experience I'll never forget, a
little eerie and a lot familiar-feeling. As I
got older, I found myself drawn to books about
Ancient Egypt, their gods and statues, the
pyramids and the sphinx, and software to make
names in hieroglyphics. When Gordon and I were
newlyweds, we made separate wish lists of the
three countries we'd like to visit some day.
When we traded lists, we laughed because we
had written down the same three countries, in
the same order: Italy, Greece, and Egypt. We
were most interested in their ancient history
and planned visits to what remained of ancient
ruins, historical sites, and museums. We
realized we could see more if we chose to go
on a guided tour. Gordon was not at all
interested in driving in a foreign country
anyway. It goes without saying, neither was I.
Italy was the first choice for Gordon because of a
regression hypnosis he had experienced that
validated his feeling, which he said was more like
a knowing, that he had lived in Ancient Rome as a
Roman Legatus Legionis, a senior office of the
Roman Legion and overall Legionary commander. I
had been previously regressed to an incarnation in
Rome during the same time period and apparently
knew Gordon in that lifetime, though he was much
older than me and I was not his Roman wife then.
In this lifetime, I would jokingly tell Gordon,
"You owe me big time for Rome!"
I longed to visit Florence to finally see the
17-foot tall marble statue of Michelangelo's David.
I had only seen a bronze replica of the
original in the Courtyard of the The Ringling
Museum of Art against the
background of Sarasota Bay in Florida. That iconic
symbol is often reported as being cast from the
original. However, on ringlingdocents.org there is
a good case for it having been cast from an
earlier bronze cast of the original.
We were both fascinated by Ancient Greece as well.
I wanted to see the jewel of Athens, the
Parthenon, which is the remains of a temple to the
Greek goddess Athena, located on the Acropolis,
a 512-foot high limestone rock where many temples
were built honoring Athena. This was indeed a hill
with a view, overlooking the city of Athens. We
both wanted to go to ancient Delphi on the slopes
of Mt. Parnassus and visit the Temple of Apollo
and see if we could feel the vibes of its
legendary Oracle. When we planned our trip to
Greece, we didn't know about the Meteora
monasteries that were built in a region of almost
inaccessible sandstone peaks.
It turned out to be one of our favorite
excursions.
Gordon had an intense desire to go to Sparta,
Greece, where he felt sure he had died as one of
the 300 Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae.
Sparta was not a stop on our tour because our tour
guide said there was nothing for tourists to see
there. However, Gordon entertained our new-found
friends on the bus with an impressive historical
interpretation of that battle in all its gory
glory. This was, of course, long before the movie
came out. He made a good case for why he wished we
could stop there. Our accommodating bus
driver/tour guide was as impressed as the
passengers and announced that he would stop in
Sparta where the battle took place to let Gordon
wander around the area for 15 minutes. The driver
got a round of applause. Gordon asked me to take a
photo of him by a bronze statue of King Leonidas
which will eventually show up in this book of my
memories.
For some reason, we waited too long and never made
it to Egypt. By the time we were seriously
thinking about booking our trip before we got too
old to enjoy it, the U.S. Department of State had
issued a travel alert for Egypt. Friends who went
anyway came back with stories that made our hair
stand on end and made us unwilling to risk it.
We had been collecting papyrus
paintings from Egypt until we ran out of wall
space in our living room. Soon small Egyptian
statues took over tabletops and bookcases.
Egyptian objects appeared in our lives on
birthdays and anniversaries, the way things do
when friends and relatives take notice of what
your latest interest is. The highlight of our
acquisitions was a life-size statue of the pharaoh
above which was being used to hold a door open at
a small store in Gainesville, Florida. The owner
said it wasn't for sale, but Gordon could sense
how much I wanted it and managed to talk the owner
into selling it to him. It was one of the most
amazing gifts he ever gave me, and my inner child
delighted in having her very own personal pharaoh.
The living room is more eclectic now, the papyrus
paintings stored for another day. The horizontal
surfaces are covered with quartz crystals in the
present moment where now is unfolding. One item
from our Egyptian stage was never stored, and that
is the Pharaoh in the Living Room.
He will remain with me in this house as long as I
live here and be a reminder of the happy life
Gordon and I shared before he went invisible in
2013.
