This time next week I will be back at the “Happiest Place on Earth”.
The summer after my mother died, my father took us to Disney World. It was not a planned vacation by any means. As far as I could tell he decided to go that morning. Told us to pack for a week or so, piled us into the family station wagon, and away we went.
We drove until evening then pulled off the highway and got a room at a Days Inn in wherever-we-were between Connecticut and Florida. Dad decided it was a perfectly fine place to stay and had the front desk make us a reservation at their Orlando location. As someone who now plans Disney vacations at least nine months in advance, this is horrifying to contemplate, but it really was a perfectly fine place to stay and they had space for us so it worked.
At Epcot we waited in line to meet Space Mickey and Minnie. They wore silver jumpsuits with giant rainbows across their chests (Governor DeSantis would probably try to censor them today). We rode the now long defunct Horizons and I voted for the undersea ending but my brothers all chose space so that’s where we went. Hollywood Studios (then Disney-MGM) was new and potentially why my dad wanted to go. He loved the Great Movie Ride and the whole Hollywood of a bygone age aesthetic. And at the Magic Kingdom all three of my brothers went crazy in the store at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean. I blame our many re-watchings of The Goonies; they wanted everything. Dad probably spent hundreds of dollars on pirate paraphernalia. It’s funny the things that stick with you.
We were walking in the Magic Kingdom, in Frontierland I think, I remember the scene in reds and browns. I was eating something or maybe I was hungry; when I think of it, my stomach reacts. It wasn’t too crowded, I can see my brothers and my father and me, spread out, looking around. The sun was high in the sky. My youngest brother, Hendrik, was the slowest due to having the shortest legs. Hendrik’s hair was pale blonde when he was little, and he had the sweetest, cutest curls, and chubby cheeks. He looked angelic. I was eight years older, and I called him my Teddy Bear. He called me Sissy.
We were in Frontierland in the middle of the day, on our strange spontaneous vacation to Disney World, and Hendrik stopped walking. We all stopped and looked over and he said, “I miss Mommy.”
The above wasn’t my first trip to Disney. My grandparents on my biological father’s side lived in Florida and took me when I was maybe six. My memories of it are even sparser but Goofy played with my grandfather’s hair. And since then I’ve visited many times, with all sides of complicated family and various friends (who also count as family). We went to Disneyland when my father was in the hospital and back to WDW the summer after he died. It was tradition.
Dad was meant to be with us on that trip in California, but he took a turn for the worse and was hospitalized. When I saw the sign at the gates of the original Magic Kingdom, “Welcome to the Happiest Place on Earth”, I burst into tears. My father was dying, happy wasn’t on the agenda. But he didn’t want us to haunt the hospital and watch him die, the way he had our mother. It was our Spring vacation, he wanted us to have fun. I dried my tears and it was a great day. A great memory, even the crying.
Disney is personal to me. It’s all wrapped up in all the different ways my life defines family. It’s nostalgia and innocence and the promise of magic. The stories above could be read as heartbreaking, but they’re healing to me. My parents were with me in their absence.
I’m leaving for Orlando in three days and the way the world is I wonder if it might be my last time at the parks. Planning this trip I learned all the ways it’s less magical and more expensive. I’ve pretty much been priced out at this point and there are other places I want to go. The shine is fading. And that’s probably a positive.
But when I walk into the Magic Kingdom, when I catch sight of the castle, that feeling is special.