EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Fatherhood
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You may not know, but I am certain you can imagine, what it is like to pass an entire summer in the quaint Mojave Desert town known as Las Vegas. If you neither know nor can imagine, I will tell you: It is hot. It is hot, and we have no ocean in which to bathe away the heat. We have a lake, but in recent years I have chosen to avoid anyone in possession of both an outboard motor and a 12-pack of Bud. Even when the heat is gone, you remember your failure to escape it, and long somehow to redeem yourself. So it was that, by the autumn of 2005, I needed a vacation. A delightful getaway to a quiet, beautiful place. A short sojourn in some natural paradise with my wife and my little boy. We chose, of course, to go to Disneyland. On a national holiday. We arrived at Main Street USA at 3:15 p.m. We were not the only ones to arrive at Main Street USA at 3:15 p.m. As it turned out, the rest of the civilized world had also arrived, and there was a parade to mark the occasion. Mickey himself was there, waving from a float. My wife held up the camera the brand-new, much-too-expensive camera to take a picture, and the thing promptly broke. I took the camera, pushed some buttons, then pushed them harder, because you can always fix a thing by pushing the buttons harder. “Shoot!” I said, give or take a vowel. “What’s wrong, daddy?” said my son. “Mommy broke the camera.” Mommy, as it turned out, was not pleased to hear that she had broken the camera. After all, she had not dropped it, or stuck a finger through the LED screen, or thrown it at Mickey Mouse. “Mommy broke the camera?” “Yes. She broke the camera.” At this point, our merry group consisted of two sulking adults and a bewildered child. Fortunately, there are no photographs of the moment. I credit Casey Jr., the Circus Train, with saving us. In any case, we were singing by the time we got off. Disneyland’s mystique lies in the speed with which it erases even the most well-founded grouchiness. “That’s how they get you,” I told my wife as we waited in line at Peter Pan’s Flight. “You spend an hour bored in line and five minutes on a ride, and by the time the ride’s over you forget you were ever bored in line.” Five minutes of riding later, we all came out smiling. “That was worth it,” my wife said. The next morning, I replaced the batteries in my camera. It worked. Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas. |
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