The power of symbols can leave us breathless. Yesterday, I spent a relatively quiet 4th of July with my father who is soon to move into a retirement center apartment. If you’ve been through that yourself or with someone, you are well aware of the excruciating process of culling and winnowing through a lifetime of STUFF to figure out what deserves to “be kept” and moved into an 500 sq ft apartment. The rest gets doled out to various and sundry places and persons, or released into only memory.
In that process, you come across a lot of symbols. Buttons and pins and fragments of notes, hand-knit sweaters from a lost loved one, pictures and shoes of a deceased spouse…or two, sheets that were well-used from long-ago nights, collections of suitcases and bags that have traveled to far-off places and continue to hold the memories in zippered compartments.
In between sorting sessions, Dad and I watched a PBS program on the construction of the Statue of Liberty. It recounted the history of the earliest dreaming of a few industrious Frenchmen in the 1800s that wanted to symbolize in a colossal way their high value of liberty. They conceived of making it a gift to what they viewed as the ideal national representation of liberty: The United States of America. They hoped that by gifting and affirming Americans in their expression of liberty, it would inspire and keep invigorated the value and vision of liberty in France…a kind of boomerang effect. I was struck that the enormity of the Statue’s physical size was matched by an enormity of resistance and challenges in its construction and even its gifting to the Americans. It was amazing that it survived, and that the visionary artists persevered long enough to give us one of our most deeply significant living symbols as a nation, which we were not at all sure at the timewe wanted.
I listened to immigrants and their families reflect on the power of seeing Lady Liberty as their ships pulled into the harbor of their new world. It also made me wonder what ramifications there are today for those immigrants whose first living symbol of the United States is a great barbed wire and heavily monitored wall, rather than a golden lamp issuing the welcome to all “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Dad shed a few tears when he unboxed his old army uniform and recounted for me the meanings of all the bars and ribbons and emblems he had earned that still were pinned in their places. I could tell that memories of his two tours of duty – one to the Canal Zone in Panama, when he was just 19, and the other to post-war Germany where he met my mother – came flooding back to him. What should we do with this living symbol? Give it an honorable burial. I took a photo, then gently removed the emblems and pins, tucking them into a ziplock bag (which could find some corner of a 500 sq ft apartment), and put the rest of moth-eaten uniform to rest among the other remnants of a life being let go into memory. 
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