A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

My bout with the Swine Flu is over, but a recurring malady still has me sidetracked: possibly the most inane repetitive stress injury ever, Dr. Seuss Elbow.
The best I can figure is that when I read books to the 3-year-old at night, I sit on the floor and lean on her bed with my left arm so she can see the pictures. Lately it’s painful to get past the first volume of illustrated rhymes or Elmo-loses-his-blanket nonsense, and we usually do 3. It aches for a while after we’re done, but goes away eventually. It recurs when I move my arm a certain way, but as Henny Youngman used to say, “Well don’t move your arm like that anymore.” I’ll have to get used to it.
I was only vaguely aware of Dr. Seuss and a lot of children’s literature before the little one came along, really, since the only kid’s books I remember having when I was young were those crummy little Golden Books. My mom always insisted I was too young to read, and I’m pretty sure they never read to me, so I don’t even know why we had them. By the time I figured it out myself I was getting kicked out of the young adult section at the library and had no interest in The Cat in the Hat.
I was a little disappointed that a lot of these things have no narrative to speak of, and sometimes barely a unifying theme. If Red Fish, Blue Fish wasn’t merely cobbled together from leftover sketches I’d be surprised. And isn’t it a cheat when you just make up words and names in order to rhyme? In his ABCs book, a “Zizzer-Zazzer Zuz” is the subject of the letter Z! What kind of a cop-out is that?
Still, the classics like Seuss, Goodnight Moon, and Where the Wild Things Are play second fiddle to blatantly educational “how to count” books and uninspired Muppet and cartoon spin-off fare. But the “real” books still have some appeal, which is good because I’d hate to have sacrificed my left arm for a bunch of Dora the Explorer adaptations.

Besides winter being about a week long with highs in the 60s, the best thing about living down here is the lizard population constantly underfoot. As common as insects during the summer up north, little anoles scamper across your path and up every wall and tree pretty much everywhere you go. They climb and cling to screens like flies; I spent some time working out on the patio the past couple of weeks and during the day they run around constantly, chasing bugs and hiding from birds. I like to think I’m living in a bad science fiction story from the fifties where the best image of an alien world the author could conjure was replacing bugs and squirrels with reptiles. All I need is a clunky robot manservant and a jet-pack and I’m a Kelly Freas painting on the cover of Amazing Stories.

Later, during the wet season, these little frogs will be all over, the babies like this no bigger than a dime. They’re much more secretive than the lizards, and I don’t know where the tadpoles grow or where they all go the rest of the year. Dead ones show up occasionally, usually flattened in a parking lot or under a pot on the patio. They dry up good and mummy-like– I nearly had my father-in-law eating one as beef jerky on the golf course one day. If they were clean they might not be bad.

Prototype #1 of my most recent secret project…

One of the great injustices of being born in the mid 1960s, in my mind, is missing out on the whole McDonald’s playland experience. I didn’t even get to go inside a McDonald’s until I was in my teens; we’d have to sit in the car with full ashtrays where you’d have cupholders these days while my mom went in for the food we’d eat in the parking lot. I have no idea why, except that they might have thought of it as a drive in from an even earlier age. But we still had drive-ins around and went to them occasionally so who knows.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m grateful for my vague memories of the original six-limbed Grimace and the talking hamburger-headed public servants that have been replaced for today’s youth with a gay clown that eats raw apple slices. They fried apples into pies in my day. DEEP fried them. Probably in lard.

But when those brightly colored habitrails appeared in every high-traffic McDonald’s and I was far too old for them, I was more than a little ticked. A youth spent on ice-cold metal monkey bars and molten-hot metal slides seemed dismal compared to what was virtually a pre-pubescent wet dream of molded plastic tube-crawling joy. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing outside of a space station, and then, surely, no sooner then the impossibly far-off year 2000. And indoors, out of the elements! With deep-fried pies within sniffing distance!

As it turns out, the only thing that seemed farther off to young me than space stations was having a daughter, but unlike flying cars and cheap sub-orbital travel some things actually come to pass. And just like Walt Disney’s bourbon-fueled Epcot visions of the future taught us, you never really know what tomorrow will bring.

It brought me to a McDonald’s near the park we like to visit with a sunstroke-reducing awning over their equally mind-numbing play fortress with rubber coated parts and a recycled tire rubbery surface beneath it. If nothing else, McDonald’s is usually your bathroom away from home, just because they always keep the place clean and have all the amenities. You learn to appreciate this kind of thing even more with a baby, because a clean place to change a diaper is like striking gold.

I should say they usually keep the place in order, because this particular McDonald’s, even in a nice area with gated communities, a thriving shopping center, and the nicest park in town across the street, was pretty screwed up. The bathroom was disorderly, and worse didn’t have a changing table on the wall. So I headed back out with the wet squirrelly two-year-old, and noticed that there’s a “family” bathroom inside the biodome that encloses one of the biggest playlands I’ve ever seen (the supposed largest anywhere is in the touristy section of Orlando). So we trekked back in and around, but this one has a padlock on the door for some reason, so back out again.

By this point the 2-year-old has taken extreme interest in the giant series of tubes (not the Internet) and there’s no going to the park until she gets a shot at them. So after a blazing hot diaper change in the car, the nice air-conditioned McDonald’s sounded like a nice place to spend her exercise time and get something to eat.

The clues should have been adding up by now that this wasn’t the choicest franchise going. I noticed that one guy who’d been waiting for his food during our first quest for a bathroom was still waiting, along with a small throng at the lunchtime rush. There was no real line, but it took nearly 20 minutes to get our order with a near-frantic two-year-old urging me over to the playland area.

But finally it came, so we headed to a table in the playland. Another bad sign going in was the door propped open with a chair, which didn’t make sense, until I realized that the giant biodome was actually a greenhouse with 2000 square feet of southern-facing glass and no air conditioning. The open door was slight relief so we sat next to it. Or, rather, I sat, because the little one had no interest in food and beelined straight into the tubes and disappeared.

My kid is pretty fearless and will climb anything. She might ask for help getting down, but doesn’t flip out or cry and scream. And of course, a few minutes into the habitrail she started calling for help. A few other older kids were going in and out of the tubes, so I thought she’d follow one of them out, but no luck, so I had to go poke my head in. She was at the top of the first tube, a slight ramp with little rubber grips for steps, that seemed pretty tame, but she wouldn’t come down. I thought she might be claustrophobic or something, so with no real options I headed up the ramp to get her.

Of course I barely fit, and it’s about 120 degrees and smells like melted polyurethane inside these things. None of this would have bothered me when I was five, but now it’s pretty uncomfortable and hard on the knees. A little coaxing got the kid out, though, and I brought her back to the table to her fruit salad. She’s cured of all tube aspirations, for now, if not forever, I figured. But of course not; she bolted up the ramp again like it was the greatest thing ever. Well, she sees how to get down now, I thought, so resigned myself to eating my hamburger and waiting her out.

The next thing I heard was “Help, Daddy,” from above me, and I looked up to see her peering down from a plastic bubble 20 feet in the air. Oh, great. There’s no way I’m climbing all the way up there, so she’s going to have to figure it out. She disappeared from the bubble but the “help” cries moved all over the top level, not panicky or scared, just like “hey come and get me.”

The older kids went in and out some more, duly reporting to me which section of the tubing she was in and repeatedly letting me know she was stuck. Their parents or grandparents were wise to the fact that this side room was a sauna and ate in the actual restaurant, so I was the only adult in there. One grandmother did come in to get her grandson and noted that “she doesn’t seem very scared, at least.” Thanks grandma. None of the kids were willing to give her a hand getting down, so as soon as the room cleared out and I finished my food I realized that I had to climb up there.

I went past the little sign that said “Ages 3 and up” and “No shoes—socks only” (the 2-year-old was in sandals) so I figured we’d already broken a couple of rules and the lackadaisical management wouldn’t bother me even if they noticed. I was soaking from sweat a few feet into the middle level, and still had to twist around a few turns to get to the last bubble I saw her in. Thankfully, she came back to the top of the ladder on the second level so my trip wasn’t as long as it could’ve been. She just didn’t like coming down the ramps alone, so a little coaxing and a cramped u-turn and we were on our way out.

No shift manager was waiting outside the last tube for us so I packed up our stuff and held on to the kid as tightly as I could because she was gung ho to climb back up the thing again. A quick sneak out the side door and by the time I had her strapped in the car seat she’d forgotten about it, and was back on some crazy demand for Dora the Explorer fruit snacks that she rejected as soon as we got out of the grocery store.

Ah, fatherhood.