For some time now, I’ve had this vision  – it started as an actual dream – about the refugee soccer  team, now called the Albany Warriors.  In the vision, Ali and the team are on a hop-on, hop-off tour bus riding up and down Manhattan, and stopping at the ferry wharf that goes out to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

At first, I dismissed this as a fantasy of mine.

All of my forbears came to America through Ellis Island, but none of the soccer team’s families came that way, they almost all few here from United Nations refugee camps in Asia and Africa and the Middle East.

I assumed this was a remote idea for them, and didn’t want to push it on them.

Last month, I was at one of the team games and sitting on the bench with several of the players. I asked them where they would most like to go, and they surprised me by saying, all at once, “New York City and the Statue of Liberty.”

None of them had ever really traveled out of Albany once they came to the United States.

They said they had been learning about it in school and they thought it as a place it would be beautiful and inspiring to see. They seemed more connect to it that our own people.

So many Americans have forgotten the Statue of Liberty, and turned from its message.

I decided then and there that the soccer team must go with Ali, who has never been there either. Maybe I can come along on this one, since my grandparents came through Ellis Island.

I have been there once, it was a very powerful thing for me.

I have come to believe that this is something the soccer team ought to see, in a sense, it is the heart of America and the American experience, one these children have in common with so many Americans in so many ways.

I began putting a small amount of money aside each week, and started reaching bus and ferry fares and ticket prices. I am more than halfway there. This morning, I had gathered information to call up Ali and tell him about this idea.

“Wow,” he said, “nice, this would be the greatest thing,” which is his highest compliment and praise.

So next week, at our regular meeting we will sit down together in our “office” and go over costs and bus arrangements and sights in Times Square worth seeing. I need to figure out precisely what it will cost to do this, and the trip will need to be a one day trip.

Ali says he will take as much of the team as he safely can in his van. It’s a straight three hour drive for him, right down the New York State Thruway.

In her great poem, once considered to be the true anthem of America, Emma Lazarus called the statue the “Mother Of Exiles.” You can keep your ancient lands and your storied pomp, she cried out with silent lips, “Give me your tired,  your poor, your huddles masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore…”

Yes, I see why these boys want to go there, and I see why they need to go. So we will start planning in earnest, and maybe I’ll add an extra ticket to the list of people going.

I am thinking I need to go also.