My daughter was 14 years old. I was forty. We had been on our own for a while, living off the emotional land, as it were. Eeking out an existence in the land of single parenthood. Bumbling my way through one bad decision after another. Plumbing the depths and bobbing back to the surface and gasping for air. Oh, look. Here’s Kristin! You need some air, too? Take a gasp, why don’t you. I did some truly deplorable things yet we both survived without major incident or incarceration. No visits from Family Services, thankfully. Some stars were not only smiling upon us benignly but grinning at us wickedly and saying, “How can we screw with them today, poor little fuckers?”
And for my fortieth
birthday Kristin wanted to do something special. She wanted to throw
me one of those fortieth birthday parties. You know, the ones with
the black balloons and the ‘Over the Hill’ banners? Kids think
that sort of thing is funny, you know. Unfortunately she hadn’t
learned enough of her Machiavelli to not let me know her plans
sufficiently in advance so I could plan my own proactive revenge.
Pathetic she.
I announced, quite
dramatically, that the first week of March, 1995, in my fortieth
year, we are going to Disney World. So that’s that. Take that ya
little twerp! Splash Mountain here we come.
As it turned out I
was slated to attend a conference in Orlando in the September of
1994. It was a computer geek, database, mainframe conference of
interest only to boring computer geek, database, mainframe,
individuals like me, but it was in Orlando, Florida. During the week
I attended many sessions, lectures, expose’s, dissections of
digital parsers, and recursive and repetitive enumerators, and other
such incomprehensibles. Plus great banquets and numerous hospitality
suites from fortune five hundred companies that wanted to give us tee
shirts and sell us products with their platinum blond booth bunnies.
You had to be there. It was a slice.
So, of course. I
took an afternoon off to go to-where else? Disney World. I and my
friend, Rick, spent an evening in Epcot Center. It might have been
called EPCOT Center back then, I don’t know if they had given up on
that Experimental Protocol shit yet or not. It was fun, anyway. Rick
didn’t understand Journey into Imagination. I loved it.
Kristin felt a
little betrayed when I told her when I got back, but I told her I had
been doing some reconnoitering. You know, seeing the land. Checking
out the alien ground. Finding out what we needed to know for our
frontal assault and such-not. Besides. I had only gone to Epcot. We
still had the Magic Kingdom all to ourselves. I’m not sure she was
convinced. But we went the following March and had a wonderful time,
anyway.
Flash forward to
today. And the next year, 2021, my daughter Kristin will be-Surprise!
Forty years old. January forth to be precise. And I want dearly to
take her and her husband, my dear son-in-law Seeth, to Disney World.
Let’s go see the magic again, shall we?
I feel there will be
symmetry. And maybe beauty. Or at least fun.
