Statue of Liberty
If being crammed together with strangers in endless lines puts you in their lives with subtle intensity, the two hour crawl up the stairwells of the Statue of Liberty makes you practically family.
At the end of such waits——in amusement parks, theaters and the like——I have actually felt separation anxiety and mourned the loss of a collective experience.
Such waits have their own rhythms, place-holding honor systems, and public displays. The immediate ecology of our waiting line featured a flutter of teen age girls. These fresh-faced queens and drones sent messages crashing back and forth. How happy they seemed, chattering obliviously as we endured this endless wait.
Attempting a friendly communication across the generational barrier, I smiled at the group. In return, they slapped their hands over their mouths, exchanged furtive glances and giggled. It's hard not to take this personally. How can this kind of thing fail to make me feel old? I identify with callow, mocking youth, but to callow youth I'm a middle aged embarrassment. And they weren't even my own kids!
"We can play the fool," they seem to say, "but you grownups are the fools!"
There's no defense. It matters not if you pose as the hip oldster or the benign neutral whose pastoral gaze skims benevolently over the rigid peaks of their moussed hair. As my son's T-shirt points out; "If it's too loud, you're too old!"
How unfair! How deliciously fun! For them.
And how annoying to those not enjoying the wait; including the man who shouted: "We're in New York for three days and we're going to spend one of them in a stairwell!"; and including the stocky, middle aged woman who folded her arms in full frontal glower.
It was generational war, but only the kids were armed. The adults carried the baggage, the unmet expectations and, finally, the resentment. Time not spent was time wasted; while for the teens, there appeared to be no time, no failed possibilities, no baggage, no past.
One hour into our wait, and all was calm and boring. I had even begun to find the girls' raucous behavior soothing, like loud tides that crash in and out —— proximate but not threatening —— when, without warning, the stocky woman randomly grabbed one of the kids by the shoulder, shook her violently and shouted something in a foreign language I couldn't identify. An emotional chord snapped? A toe stepped on? Who could tell?
Suddenly, the happy teenage hive was stilled. Someone else had commandeered center stage, but it was a critic; an angry, severe, punishing, frightening critic.
The girl broke into tears and was comforted, in turn, by each and every one of her friends.
Beyond the bodily assault, the girl seemed traumatized by a sense of incredible impropriety. She kept sobbing: "How could she do that? Who does she think she is?" .
I was perplexed by the girl's collapse, her vulnerability, and her descent into a panic that well outlived the nasty episode. Suddenly, the girl turned and faced her attacker, and the hidden burdens of youth were revealed in a snapshot moment of dark revelation, as she cried: "How could you do that? You're not my mother!"