Don't Ever Grow Up

Showing my baby sister the plan for the day..I was around four at the time.

Oh man tonight's hard. I don't even know why. I have my Disneyland audio on shuffle, and more of the older audio has been coming on, and I'm sitting here thinking about life, and all of these memories are flooding back to me. Disney's been a large part of my childhood just like many other children. But as I started to grow, I took that part of my childhood and started to apply to wanting to make the magic happen that I once fell in love with for others. No, I don't work for the mouse, but it doesn't stop me from dreaming and thinking about what I could someday do. 

But that's off topic. Tonight's hard for me because I'm sitting here listening to my childhood, and thinking about the trips my family's taken over the years. How I can hear this: 

And instantly go back to one of the most vivid memories ever for me. 

You see, it was Valentine's Day. Fourth Grade. My school planned a visit to the San Fernando Mission that day, and my mama was a chaperon on our trip. We explored the mission and learned a lot, but my mom had something else planned that I didn't know about. She signed me out early, and 'kidnapped' me for a mama/son date at Disneyland for Valentine's Day. Thanks to traffic, it took us three hours from San Fernando to reach Disneyland, but that didn't stop us! I got to pick dinner, so we made our way to one of my favorite restaurants, the Plaza Inn at the corner of Main Street. Dining on a chicken leg, biscuits and lemonade, we watched the parade go by, and then once we were done, made our way to Pirates of the Caribbean. I can still remember how surprisingly busy it was, but we walked around and I got to pick every ride to go on. From Pirates, to Matterhorn, to Autopia, and the train, we rode only four rides that night before heading home, but not before we stopped at the lego store to get any lego I wanted under $10. 

And that's just one of the memories I have...

It's not just a day like that with my mom that's getting me. It's the fact I can still imagine as a younger child how huge Disneyland seemed. How amazing it was to just walk from a jungle, right into the frontier west, and believe that it was actually a real world, and not the world we live in. How I could fight alongside pirates, and then float around with ghosts in that old Mansion by the river. Everything was so beyond real, that I never could see the literal mechanisms that power those Pirates or Ghosts. It was always reality to me that they existed, and that's what makes me fall in love with Disney all over: the fact that there's so many hidden things that unless you know what to look for, you miss it, and missing the literal nature of the rides often times makes things so much better. 

This brings me to my closing. Disneyland was made for the "ideals, dreams and hard facts that created America, with the hopes that would be a source of joy, and inspiration to all the world" (Walt Disney's opening day speech). It's the one place in the world specifically designed with the intent to leave your troubles at the door, and just embrace the wonders of pure imagination and magic. Tonight, it's hard because I'm listening to the past audio of yesterland, and thinking about how innocent, how wonderful it was to just not know about what MADE things what they were, and just embrace the fact that it was there. It was magic of Mickey's sorcerer wand that brought things to life. It was the pixie dust that made things fly. Now that I'm 15 days away from turning 20, it's a hard pill to swallow when people are so cynical, and so negative about the world. They have to find something, anything, about everything to nitpick at. They can't just take things without questioning if it's something legitimate or not. That actually really brings me down, because there's so much that people miss out on when they lose sight of how being purely innocent and practically naive, can actually make things better for you. Having friends talk about who they're hooking up with, or what party they're going to makes me want to crawl back down the rabbit hole even more, because we're still young! We're only 18, 19, 20..there's still 60 or 70 years in our lives, why start with all those 'experiences' now, when we're still able to just stay youthful, and focus on the innocence of the world, or what's left of it? As long as I live, I am going to fight to maintain as much of that innocent magic as I can. If not for myself, then for the future generations that start to fall in love with Disney like I did.