Day 157 - Disneyland

Disneyland image by photographerglen, via Flickr.com

From the day we kids learned about Disneyland, we began planning for our family trip there. Mom got a big piggy bank for us to put our pennies, nickels, and perhaps a dime or two into as we began saving for that trip. In the years we continued our planning even after we moved from one house on Dudrey Court to another across the street, still on Dudrey Court. The coins kept accumulating, but over time, I grew up and thought myself too old to go to Disneyland.

By the time Mom, Dad, and the younger four of my siblings made it to Disneyland, I was through college, married, and living in northern California, closer to Disneyland than ever before, but still too far away to consider a trip there. Years passed until I finally realized that I hadn't outgrown Disneyland. I had just put the dream aside for awhile.

In December of 1972, I put the few things I owned that were too big to fit into my VW bug into the attic of the church in Berkeley where I had worked for the past three years and packed the rest, along with my cat, into the car and headed south to Los Angeles where I planned to spend Christmas with Dad's sister Irene. It was a round-about way to get back to Minnesota before I moved to San Francisco to begin again as a student, this time in graduate school at California State University at San Francisco, but it made sense to head south first because I then planned to head for Phoenix to spend a few days with Mom's parents where Mom and Dad, Joan, Roger, Bruce, and Brian were spending Christmas. I expected to leave two or three days after Christmas for Phoenix, spend a few days there with the family, and then have Joan join me in my car for the rest of the trip to Moorhead. Because I would be so close to Disneyland, I decided to go there the day after Christmas - fulfilling that childhood dream.

Old City of Sana'a by kgbbristol, via Flickr.com

But Dad had other plans. He knew I would be in Los Angeles, and he knew that I had always wanted to go to Disneyland. But he wasn't sure I would make the trip to Disneyland by myself. So Mom and Dad and my four siblings made the trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles the day after Christmas to make sure that I got to Disneyland. We had a wonderful day.

Disneyland has remained a symbol of a dream for me. There is always something in me that can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland. It's as though the real place was just a hint of what Disneyland is meant to be.

image of Yemeni men by eesti,
via Flickr.com

When I was in Doha, Qatar, I recall a conversation with one of my colleagues, Martin, who mentioned a group of people who were planning to travel from Disneyland to Doha. Martin seemed concerned about the trip, giving me the impression that he thought a trip from Disneyland would be dangerous. It was a curious conversation until Martin finally figured out that I wasn't understanding him at all. He was using Disneyland as a code word for a completely different place, a place that we didn't speak of when in most Middle Eastern countries, certainly not over a telephone line. The group of people Martin spoke of were planning a trip to Doha after a stop in Israel. Such a routing meant complications because an entry stamp indicating a stop in Israel in a passport could mean no entry would be permitted into Qatar. Disneyland was used as a symbol of a forbidden place, a curious twist on my thoughts about Disneyland.

image of Yemeni women by
carpetblogger via Flickr.com

The image of Disneyland was very much on my mind much of the time I spent in Sana'a, Yemen. The old city of Sana'a, with its six-story tall adobe buildings complete with gingerbread icing around the doors, windows, and roof lines, conjured up images of Fantasy Land castles. The people walking in the streets of Sana'a seemed very much like fairy tale characters. The men wore the unlikely combination of skirts, sport coats, wide belts with knives tucked in front, and scarves both around their shoulders and on their heads. Many of the women wore very colorful cloths covering them from head to toe with one type of cloth looking like a tie-dyed mask often topped with a straw hat and a tin tray heaped with bags of rice, flour, sugar, or other foodstuffs. In another part of Yemen, the women wore straw hats with enormously tall and pointed crowns, very much like a traditional witch's hat. Living in Yemen was even better than visiting the Disneyland of Anaheim where all the people being visited were only in costumes, not every day clothing, and were paid for performing, not living side by side with those of us visitors.

image of Yemeni woman and child by IRNI,
via Flickr.com

More than 30 years ago, I left Iran, but brought nightmares of the place with me. It took years before those nightmares stopped and were finally replaced by occasional dreams. Less than 15 years ago, I left Yemen, bringing with me dreams of the place that I didn't want to end. In my dreams, I returned to Sana'a Old City's souq where I enjoyed the fragrance of all the spices, along with a few more earthy scents, where I heard the music from the homes above the shops, the chanting of the muezzin in the mosques, where I saw the bright colors of the Kashmir shawls, the coral, amber, turquoise, gold, and silver of the jewelry merchants. Each night as I dreamed of those sights, sounds, and smells, I worried as the quantities of them shrank, reflecting the distance between the real thing and my memories.

Disneyland remains the symbol of a dream for me. I am fortunate to have experienced such varied experiences that seem part of that dream. And I can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland for real.