Reflections On Disney

Old Magic Kingdom Park map from 70s In a tattered box in my mother’s closet, we found the disorganized shuffle of memories from our Disney vacation when Walt Disney World was new and young.  As I sorted through the litany of things my mother saved, I was overcome with nostalgia.  I always feel like my mom saves ridiculous things often to a hoarder level but this time her treasures, to me, actually were treasures.  I know the 50 th anniversary has pulled us all back to a place of nostalgia in their merchandising and so I thought this was a beautiful time to share some things from my personal Disney memory box.  On both our trips as a very young child there was only one theme park – Magic Kingdom.  They also had River Country as the water park and Discovery Island, the bird sanctuary, which still sits to this day, unoccupied, in the middle of the lagoon off the shores of the Ft Wilderness Campground.  You can also see it from the shoreline of Wilderness Lo...

When I was a child, my family went on only two vacations.  Both were to Disney World in Orlando, FL. Although I was young, I have very vivid memories of those trips.  Swimming in the Polynesian pool in my crocheted bikini watching my dad come down the rock water slide, holding my Mickey head balloon, taking the boat ride to the Magic Kingdom where I couldn’t wait to ride Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean as many times as I could manage to talk my dad into. I remember small, seemingly ridiculous things like my brother and I getting ice from the hotel ice maker, seeing the birds on Discovery Island, wading into the water at River Country. I even remember eating those little boxes of cereal at breakfast every morning despite my father insisting I should eat something else. After all, he was paying Disney prices for those meals. I don’t think, for a child, there is a more magical place on earth than Disney. Lights are brighter, senses are heightened, memories are etch...

On many evenings past it has been my husband's job to "catch Tinkerbell" as she makes her nightly flight from the spire high on Cinderella’s castle. In addition to her new role in Enchantment, he was also in that position on the evening of her final appearance in the much-beloved "Happily Ever After" as the show ran for its last time. Although I'm not sure he always sees it, I feel it is a poignant role of honor for him to play and one which holds deep significance for us. Many years ago, while hosting a wish family (a family where one of the parents is terminally ill), my husband was doing the same job as he was for the final show of HEA, a job now returned to him in random moments of fate and the strange displacement of the pandemic. Standing with the family in the shadow of the castle awaiting the moment of Tinkerbell's flight, their young boy began asking me questions about the logistics of the whole deal, quite intrigued. His younger sister stoo...

I still remember distinctly driving home right after the pandemic started and being very aware that there were no fireworks. Living near Walt Disney World in Orlando for over 25 years the nightly display became as normal and expected as the sunset, a constant you could set a watch by. I didn’t always see them, but I knew they were there. And then one day, they weren’t. For me, the silent dark skies over Disney had become a personal representation of this entire pandemic. It had been as if, like me, the empty sky had been holding its breath those long 15 months.  No light. No sound. No color. I had always felt that I wouldn’t be confident that we were returning to normal until fireworks adorned our skies again. It was my own intimate and silent marker. One I dared not speak aloud for what, to many (including my own household), may have sounded trivial amidst the chaos of unemployment and the collapse of the lives we once knew. But for me, the fireworks have always meant so much more...