So it must have been late 80's early 90's - I was in the 7-12 age range I would
guess. And I was in the neighbor's Astro van - which, side note, I
believe vans are cool in proportion to the likelihood your family has
one. There was about a 1% chance my parents would ever own a van, so this
Astro van was the coolest vehicle I had ever seen, aside from a limousine I saw
once. But no kid has parents with a limousine. The neighbor girls
and I were rolling in the back seat. Life was good. Somebody said "I heard they are going to
build a Disneyland by the Shawnee Mall". My immediate thought was -
of course! Why wouldn't they? Where else on earth could you get
Esprit shirts and Guess pants than Shawnee, Oklahoma? (Or, Oklahoma
City...but they had Frontier City there with two roller coasters.
Disneyland could never compete with that.) It was obvious Disneyland
would never make it in Seminole, Oklahoma. Despite the awesomeness of my
hometown and my ambitious imagination I knew that Disney would never be coming to
Seminole. But the Shawnee Mall had only been built months earlier - and
having a mall just 30 minutes from my house made me feel like a rock
star. Who has a mall 30 minutes from their house? Probably people
that live next to Disneyland, am I right?
Looking out the van window I could already see it in my minds eye. The
vacant prairie land beyond the Shawnee Mall was practically made for
Disneyland. It would be the best thing ever. Everyone would come to
see it, and my family would go there once a week. They would have like
three roller coasters and then when you were done at Shawnee Disneyland you
could go to the Shawnee Mall food court and get Sbarros Pizza and Dippin'
Dots. How lucky could a girl be?
Months went by, and Disneyland wasn't built yet. When I asked my mom
when the building was to start, she resolutely told me that there would be no
Disneyland in Shawnee. I asked her what went wrong? Why wasn't it
coming? And she was so puzzled - as a parent, I now realize she had no
capacity for even imagining a Disneyland in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She didn't
even need to research this intriguing fact at all - she just knew, intuitively,
that there never will be a Disneyland in Shawnee. Me, on the other hand,
I was just as intrigued by how little she cared about this exciting news.
Didn't she want to go read the paper and find out for sure that Disneyland
wasn't coming to Shawnee? Didn't she need to demand answers? (There
was no internet at this point people. Just think about
that for
five minutes.)
I bring this up because last night I took my 6 year old swimming. She
started playing this game where she was pretending to be an animal in the water
and I was supposed to guess it. She started with shark. It really
was beautifully executed. I think she was pretending to maul some kind of
prey and shook it until it was dead...I mean, that is what I would guess that
was. The next ones I couldn't guess. I kept saying dolphin...she
was apparently a drowning baby bunny rabbit, a kangaroo that was doing flips,
and a shark again. But it wasn't like she was "pretending" to
be a drowning rabbit - I could see that in her imagination she was totally
transformed. She was really irritated - genuinely thinking I was probably
the dumbest person on the face of the planet because somehow I was missing her
perfect execution of "drowning rabbit". She grew tired of the
game not because she doubted her abilities to perfectly pretend to be any
animal, but because she didn't want to play with someone who was so seriously
impaired that they couldn't even guess her very literal translation of flipping
kangaroo. I love that kind of imagination that says everything is
possible. I just think that kind of thinking must make life incredibly
fun.
