3
"Line up!" my son commanded me, his mother, his grandparents, his babysitter. We added up to seven, and we lined up. "March!" he would then command, and we marched. The previously distributed simulations of shovels and picks were at slope arms over our shoulders. A few of the implements were actual scale models of picks and shovels but some were toy golf clubs, an umbrella, a plain old stick. Outfitted, we marched. "Sing!" We sang "Heigh Ho!" as we marched. It was this part of the movie my son returned to over and over, this going off to work. He learned very early to manipulate the remote for the VCR. He marched the Seven Dwarfs over to the mines and back, studying the formation. Disney aided the obsession by producing a videotape of excerpted songs from a variety of films in its vaults. The Dwarfs marching and singing while they did so was one bit featured. We made it to the couch. "Dig!" and we dug, mining the cushions and pillows. We sang: "We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, in a mine the whole day through!" And took a breath and sang: "To dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, that's what we like to do." I never understood the accepted conventional wisdom about attention span and the modern child. We marched endlessly. We sang for hours. We dug to China and back. It was I who always lost interest, attention waning. I called the marches to a halt, rained on the parade. The other adults becoming self-conscious again, put down their tools, brushing the dust from their clothes. I distracted my son (who was redistributing the tools, reordering the cadre of dwarfs before him as they struggled up from their knees) by flipping on the TV, the accepted accused culprit of expanding the attention deficit, the supposed modern distraction. He scanned the tape and found the marching, the digging, and sent the images of the dwarfs back and forth on the screen. He watched as if it were the replay of the scene he had just finished staging, an actual record not simply another version. He worked the buttons of the remote, pored over the images. Maria Montessori said that a child's play was his work, or was it a child's work is his play? In my stupor I thought it doesn't matter. It works both ways.
4
I remember the exact moment my son transformed. It was at a school carnival, an annual event, we had attended since he was in second grade. Now he was in sixth, and although the booths and games of the fair remained constant, he was changing, literally growing, lengthening, stretched out. We drifted together over to the dunking booth. A friend of his, already wet, was on the bench, taunting the hurlers as they wound up. We watched the action side by side. Without thinking, I draped my arm around his shoulders. Instantly, I felt him tense at the touch, and immediately he began to wilt and melt away, twist out from underneath my half-embrace. It was almost botanical, leaves curling up in contact to some toxin.
In the movie Snow White mistakes the scaled-down house and furnishings she stumbles on in the forest as the habitat of children. She herself is, as they say, but a child, a child lost in the woods. Or until very recently Snow White was indeed a child. She now finds herself in the woods because one day, without her knowing it, she crossed some line from child to adult. That day the Magic Mirror's magic radar noticed that she was no longer what she had been. She became "the fairest," a code for pubescent, I suppose. Now she could be "seen." The mirror reflected that fact back to the Queen, her evil stepmother. I always ask why that day, why this one particular day? Did Snow White generate the final cell of her milky skin that morning, grow the final significant eyelash? Pubescence also suggests sprouting down or fine hair. Did the last of the downy coat sprout? Or shed? Did her lips happen to blush the proper shade of red, her eyes refract, at last, the right frequency of sparkle? Something made her euphemistically "fairest," this final part of the puzzle. One day. It was a Thursday, I guess, and the world changed. In the forest, breaking into the Dwarfs' house, she mistakes it as the house of lost children. She identifies with their lostness. She is lost. And maybe she sympathizes with their childness. She herself was recently a child. She suspects, however, that something has changed. She is no longer a child. She doesn't fit into any of the beds she finds, uses all the beds in the house for her bed. And later, when the Dwarfs return from mining, they peek over the beds' footboards, seven Kilroys Were Here. She awakes, startled to discover that the children she anticipates are not children after all. "Why," she says, "you're little men!"
Now I think of another moment, another scene from when my son was much younger. One day, I was driving in the car. My son was strapped into his car seat in the back. As I adjusted the mirror it reflected him, stuffed into what seemed to be an undersized bucket. I was taken with how he had changed, grown larger, and I considered for a second the disclaimer printed on the outside mirrors of such reflected distortion: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. But I couldn't help asking him, "When did you grow up?" Without hesitating he answered, "Night time."
5
Living in Oblivion is a movie about making a movie. There is a dwarf in one scene of the movie being made in the movie. It is a dream sequence, and the dwarf hired to play a dwarf in the dream is directed to laugh. The actor asks the director for his motivation. And the director shrugs, offering only that it is a dream. After several unsuccessful takes the dwarf finally erupts, condemning the use of dwarfs in movies, in stories. Dwarfs, he says, are always in cinematic dreams. The only work he can get as a dwarf actor is in playing a dwarf in a dream. "When you dream," he asks the director, "do your dreams have a dwarf?" The dwarf actor eyes the director, who is considering the question. "I'm a dwarf," the dwarf says, "and I don't even dream of dwarfs."
I wonder sometimes why Disney World and all the worlds of Disney are such hits. Why do certain things take us? Why do certain aesthetic arrangements succeed? Why, of all the flavors in the world, should a cola catch on? Why that cartoon mouse or that cartoon dog? The images created by Disney crowd out any alternative Alices or Snow Whites or even Dwarfs. Sometimes I think it is genetic, that people are predisposed, attracted naturally to certain combinations of things, hard-wired to respond instinctually as they do to an infant, say, or a puppy. I read somewhere of Mickey's graphic evolution, his transformation from the ratlike steamboat Mickey to the high-foreheaded, big-eyed, shorter-nosed, babylike Mickey we all know. And love. Disney World is the place dying children wish for. As a last wish! Stanley Elkin's novel The Magic Kingdom even features this curiosity. A tour of seven terminal children (their maladies roughly analogous to the Disney dwarfs' characteristic monikers-the "Sneezy" is a child with cystic fibrosis, the "Sleepy" child has narcolepsy, etc.) is trucked off to the Florida theme park. The children in the novel try to make it clear that this manufactured happiness of this happiest place on earth is not making them happy. It isn't their last wish at all. They long for a chance to grow up, of course, and seek in the sexless magic kingdom a chance for sex. An ultimate ride, their first and last roll in the hay. They desire to desire. They wish their illicit wish.
Disney World is a deathless place, simply enough. And I think of all the dying children who will never grow up, sentenced not only to an early death but also to an adult's version of an early death. Better to die than to grow up. There is, in the real Magic Kingdom, this studied confusion between life and death-the robots and androids, the elaborate costumed characters, the endless parades, the "cast members" sweeping, sweeping and smiling, smiling. The Main Streets ageless, frozen in time just in time.