Midlife Meditation

My first impression was that she's smaller than I expected. There's a copy of Liberty's face in the museum. Here are Amy and Sarah posing with it: It's still big, for a face; but when you stop to think what it represents, what this "new colossus" has meant to tens of millions of soon-to-be new Americans, you think maybe it should be a little bigger. I first realized I wanted to climb to the crown of the Statue of Liberty sometime in the early 1980s. It was before the statue was refurbished for its 1986 centenary, so the stairs were, apparently, wider than they are now, not the narrow double-helix that provides separate up and down routes. There was a PSA that depicted a middle-aged man laboring up an unidentified staircase, his kids egging him on, until finally he arrived, gasping, at the top. The camera zoomed out then to show that he was looking out of the windows in the crown. The message was to take one's blood pressure medicine, or watch ...

May 12, 1983. I am 22 years old. In the next 24 hours, I will experience three rites of passage: my first taste of alcohol, college graduation, and saying goodbye to the best friends I have ever had. As passages go, this one's a tripleheader.   I've written elsewhere about the "Element Gang," one of the nicknames for the Group (which is how I always referred to it). This entire essay is going to be about how I evolved from that to this:    I took this selfie last Saturday, July 20, as I introduced my son Sean (who turned 21 in May) to the joy of beer. Joyful to me, that is; utterly unappealing to him. Two different beer festivals, and we couldn't find a single one he liked, though he did appreciate some cider. Now back to me. I was raised by teetotal Baptists. Don't let the Methodist trappings fool you: both my parents were born and raised American Baptist, and while my father did spend most of his career as a Methodist minister, he never gave up...