[ed. Terrific read, not just for the "being there" feeling it provides (...I've never been there), but the fascinating background story on how Disney World came about, its effect on Orlando, and the politics that made it happen.]
Something you learn rearing kids in this young millennium is that the word “Disney” works as a verb. As in, “Do you Disney?” Or, “Are we Disneying this year?” Technically a person could use the terms in speaking about the original Disneyland, in California, but this would be an anomalous usage. One goes to Disneyland and has a great time there, probably — I’ve never been — but one Disneys at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. There’s an implication of surrender to something enormous.
One night my wife, M. J., said I should prepare to Disney. It wasn’t presented as a question or even as something to waste time thinking about, just to brace for, because it was happening. We have some old friends, Trevor and Shell (short for Michelle), and they have a girl, Flora, 5, who is only a year older than our daughter, Mimi. The girls grew up thinking of each other as cousins and get along beautifully. Shell and Trevor also have a younger son, Lil’ Dog. He possesses a real, dignified-sounding name, but his grandparents are the only people I’ve ever heard call him that. All his life he has been Lil’ Dog. The nickname didn’t come about in any special way. There’s no story attached. It was as if, at the moment of birth, the boy himself spoke and chose this moniker. When you look at him, something in him makes you want to say, “Lil’ Dog.” He’s a tiny, sandy-haired, muscular guy, with a goofy, lolling grin, who’s always about twice as heavy when you pick him up as you thought he was going to be.
Through family, Shell had come into some discount tickets, enough for the seven of us. It seemed not even a day passed between my getting a slight rumble of that news and finding myself at the wheel of the black Honda, headed south-southwest from North Carolina. For events to have actually moved this quickly is not far-fetched. M. J. often springs trips and appointments on me, in some cases literally overnight, knowing that if she removes the time factor, I won’t be able to generate bogus neurotic back-out plans. Many of the best vacation memories of my life I owe to these strategies, which prove again a useful principle for all couples: don’t try to change each other. Study and subvert each other.
The camper containing Shell, Trevor, Flora and Lil’ Dog moved south-southeast from Chattanooga. We were converging like lines on a graphing calculator. Unless you are very, very strong, the time will come when you Disney, and our time had come, unrolling like a glaring scroll in the form of I-95. It was a Saturday. The next day would be Father’s Day. This whole voyage, it turned out, was billed as a Father’s Day gift to me and Trevor, which in my case was like having been shot with a heavy barbiturate dart and bundled off to your own birthday party. Nonetheless I had little anxiety — a total lack of options will often produce a strange, free feeling. In the rearview mirror, Mimi practically strained her car-seat buckles with impatience. My highway thoughts passed through a curious phase of gratitude toward Walter Disney, as an individual, for having made possible such an intensity of childhood joy. Maybe Trevor felt the same about his little brood, hundreds of miles away, fewer each minute.
There’s something I should mention about Trevor, though I wouldn’t if it weren’t relevant to much of what came later, but he smokes a stupendous amount of weed. Think of a person who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, that’s 20 cigarettes. Trevor smokes about that many joints, on a heavy day, the first one while he’s making coffee. And yet is highly functional in all social and professional senses, or almost all. I’ve definitely seen him muff some conversations. Still, 90 percent of the time he’s one of the sharpest and most interesting people I know. But to repeat: the brother is always, always high. We’re not talking about stuff your roommate grew in the side lot, either; this is California high-grade he obtains through a kind of nationwide medical-marijuana co-op, moving the legally obtained stuff out of California and into other states. It works the same as regular weed dealing, apparently, but you’re not supporting a criminal network. Except insofar as you are part of a criminal network. It is one of the many contradictions of living at a time when half the country thinks of weed as more innocent than alcohol and the other half thinks of it as a stepping stool to hard drugs. I needled Trevor once for details on his source. He said that, unfortunately, there was one rule: don’t tell your friends.
When Trevor and I became tight — as neighbors, in our early 20s — I was smoking a bit myself, almost competing with him. But when I hit 30, I backed up off it, as the song says. I never stopped liking the stuff or feeling that it benefited me, for that matter, but the habit was starting to make me dumb, and I was just humble enough by 30, I guess, to realize I hadn’t been born with enough cerebral ammunition to go voluntarily squandering any of it. Meanwhile Trevor stayed committed. And when we get together, a couple of times a year, I won’t lie, I fall prey to old patterns. Every so often it causes worry in my wife, especially since our daughter came along. Mostly I think she sees it as a useful pressure valve, which keeps me straighter and narrower the rest of the year. (Study, subvert: happiness = winner.)
Read more:
