1995

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.