I Need A Ticket to Ride

My family went to Disney World for the first time just about eight years ago, when I was in the 8th grade. It was Spring Break, right before we got our dog –we had to take the big vacation before we became so emotionally bound to a four-legged creature that we would never leave the house unless we could take her with us and we stopped wanting to go places that wouldn’t let us bring her with us anyway. If I felt like the oldest kid in the Magic Kingdom then, you can imagine how I would feel at age twenty when we went back.

But it’s a good thing we weren’t one of those families who feels obligated to hit It’s a Small World as soon as their infants can focus their pupils. “Load up the car! She’s ready for her mouse ears!” Taking it all in as a mature and moderately well-adjusted teenager was hard enough. The lights, the colors, the displays, the backdrops, the fake plants, the real plants, the animatronic Beatles concert, the hundreds of other guests within eyeshot and earshot at any given moment (entertainment in itself), all the information in the tour book, the luxurious bathroom at the hotel, the food…

We ate at this restaurant with a beach theme and great burgers and I have no clue what I ordered but I still remember the exact train of thought that came barreling through my head in the middle of dinner, “This is a great restaurant. I like the decor. Yum. Oh no! What if this is my favorite restaurant in the world? I’ll never get to go to my favorite restaurant in the world because it’s in Florida! On my birthday, when you’re supposed to eat dinner at your favorite restaurant in the world, I ever won’t be able to because my favorite restaurant in the world is in Florida and every birthday from now on will be ruined because I don’t think my parents will let me fly to Florida in the middle of February!”

There was a lot to absorb and since I’m me, I felt it was my responsibility to absorb it all. I still remember having this feeling that was like “Who do you think you are, coming to Disney World and not seeing everything?” and that kept me from just living in the moment and having a little fun. And then, “Who do you think you are, coming to Disney World and not letting yourself have fun?” I still remember feeling jealous of kids who didn’t take Disney World so seriously, and then scorning them for not being good enough tourists, and then scorning myself because I obviously wasn’t being a very good tourist, either. Wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation?

When I was home and unpacked and back at school, I wore my Mickey Mouse sweatshirt (the shoes, the shorts, the ears, the mouse) and thought about my brother and my mom wearing the exact same one because we all got them together, and when people asked what I did for spring break, I thought about my favorite part of the whole trip –riding Splash Mountain with my dad. That was the best. I couldn’t picture the petals on every single flower at Epcot, but I decided that I had catalogued all of those moments, everything I had seen or heard, in neuro-filing cabinets in my memory and even if I couldn’t recall each and every one at will, they were in there somewhere. If I needed one, it would just be there.

What really mattered was that I remembered how it felt to sit in a giant log at the crest of the big drop on Splash Mountain, wearing a rain poncho, and peer over the end of our log, into the brambles, with my dad right beside me. I felt too scared and brave and excited to worry about anything else. There wasn’t time to figure out exactly what I should be thinking or feeling at that moment. And with my dad right there, with the same vantage point, in a matching poncho, testing out the same hands-in-the-air roller coaster pose, the pressure to absorb it all must not have been so strong. When we tipped forward, all I had to do was scream. And that part was easy.