Nearly twenty years ago, I made a wish.
I made it so long ago in fact, that I no longer recall whether I actually made it, or if I made it after the fact and somehow retro-actively imprinted it onto my memory, but it comes to the same thing really.
I was just going on 13 years old when my family last took a vacation; but in some ways that last one was an act of trying to hold ourselves together, looking back – even though we have some great memories of it, it didn’t quite feel right. The last one that ‘felt’ right, was when I was 8, and that’s the one I think of when I search my memory. That’s the one that stands out. That was when we drove down to California, stopping at all kinds of little hotels along the way, it was the trip I went through Winchester Mystery House, and threw a fit weeks later when my parents wanted to go to Alcatraz (long story, I’m pretty sure I explained it in a previous entry)…
Many people make light of the fact that Disneyland is so very dear to me, but those people don’t really understand the why behind it. There’s a very real reason behind my attachment to the park and it’s only partially because of that reason that I’ve been trying to get back for so long. When I was a kid my parents and I spent a lot of time running away from something that we really couldn’t run from; California was our escape, the one place we had where nothing could catch up to us. They bent over backwards to give that to me, and they really couldn’t afford it. In my own personal terminology, Disneyland was the ultimate “Dolly in the Corner”.
What began as a hazy idea in my self-centered childhood mind became a full-fledged determination in early university (Silver will doubtlessly vouch for this), I started contacting travel agents, booking package quotes, anything and everything I could do to get us there – to get us back when we weren’t running. It never worked. Those of you who have seen the movie Up! , I (and eventually my mother as well) was constantly running into situations that caused me to have to smash my own personal “Paradise Falls” jar. Between England and the requirements necessary to start up my shipboard career (medical ain’t cheap) a lot of that failure was my fault, and sometimes I thought I would never forgive myself for it.
But at the years went by, I got more and more determined. There’s not a single member of my little Pack that hasn’t heard dozens of times about ‘Shaughnessy’s ever-planned trip to California’…even Toffy knows about it, and has been on edge trying to book my contracts against it’s possible occurrence for the last three years…
So…
Wipe the resigned smiles off all your faces and replace them with genuine ones…
Because…
WE BOOKED THE TRIP TWO DAYS AGO!!!