All in all, the golden anniversary weekend was a hoot. Most fun to watch: The virtuoso rock and roll dancing (early fifties hybrid jitterbug/rockabilly) by multiple seventysomething couples on Saturday night. It stands to reason, of course, that if you were twenty when "Rock Around The Clock" came out, you're right around seventy now, and rockin' out is just like riding a bicycle.

My mom, although she wasn't able to fly out again for the party, contributed a couple of photos to the commemorative scrapbook. One was a picture of Mom and me, taken by Rick on the Ellis Island ferry in late November of 1991; it was one of the stops we made on our long, circuitous drive from Watertown, Massachusetts to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Mom came with us as far as New York, so we could visit a few relatives and then make our pilgrimage to the museum on the site of Grandma Anna's long-ago arrival from Sicily.

I remember that after we parked and left the car in the lot on the Jersey side, where we were going to catch the ferry, my mother saw something shining on the ground. She bent over to inspect it, then picked it up. It was a recently minted penny. My mother held it up and laughed. "The streets are paved with gold," she said. And then we sailed to Ellis Island.