Vacation - Day One - Evening

It was an easy day to start a vacation on. I lingered in bed, then met Tony for breakfast over at Goodies II.  Breakfast inside me, I swung home and spent an hour or so tinkering around, then joined back up with Tony and ran a couple of errands while getting ready for vacation.  I am basically set to go and tomorrow I just need to throw the incidentals into my bag and I am ready to hit the road - or the air, as the case may be.

We had lunch at Pasta Pomodoro at Santana Row and then took a wandering walk through Best Buy, just to see what the newest tech toys were.  From there, I swung back home and spent the afternoon printing off documents for the trip this weekend, called the ranch, did some incidental things around the house and then settled in to watch "Master and Commander" with Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, an enjoyable movie.  I followed that up with several hours of watching my TomTom update.

Then, I finally heard from my nephew, who was transferred to the hospital in Rapid City, SD.  He is recovering from internal bleeding, as side effect of his illness.  Still, it was good to talk to him and he was going to call the ranch after he talked to me.  A close one, and we can only hope that he learns the lesson about staying on his medication and taking care of himself.

Daily Life: Disney Haunts My Dreams

I had a fitful and dreaming night last night. I am not sure if there was any particular reason, or if it just was where I was. Of the dreams I had one that was particularly strange that I thought I would share.

I dreamt my living room was a chat room and that all my furniture was chatting. There was this particularly obnoxius lamp that irritating everyone in the chat room. I watched it for a while and I suddenly realized it was not my lamp - it was the magic lamp from Disney's Fantasia.

I like Fantasia but I haven't seen it in years, so the appeareance of the lamp was a little strange. But, on thinking about it as I drove into work this morning, I can easily see where the fertile subconscious was tilled and the lamp turned up.

I am going down to that ultimate pop-culture fest, the San Diego Comic Con, for vacation. It is, of course, the celebration of many things from popular culture, including comic books, graphic novels, and animation - of which Disney remains the American King of Animation. If I think of animated movies, the first ones that pop into my mind are the Disney classics of my youth.

One of my early movie memories is going to see "The Jungle Book" at the Elks Theatre in Rapid City, South Dakota with my brother Dusty and my dad. In was a winter night and after the movie we went to the diner next door and had apple pie and hot chocolate. It is a very good memory.

Remembering Icky

Writing the essay about how my mother discovered there was no Santa Claus reminded me of…Icky.

In my mom's house in South Dakota are various mementos of our childhood - my brothers and my sisters. My mother is not particularly a "keeper of things". Many of our childhood memories went out the door in rummage sales as soon as they passed from our relatively short childhood attention spans.

But, sitting on a rocking chair in one of the spare bedrooms is Icky.

Icky is a doll. Icky is MY doll.

When I was about three, I had gone to Kresge's department store in Rapid City, SD, on Jackson Boulevard, with my mom. I was old enough to pick out my own present. Apparently, I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted a big floppy doll with messy brown hair and big brown eyes.

My mother tried to encourage me to get some other toy, but my heart was set on that doll. (Being strong willed is definitely a family trait - we tend to know what we want and devil take the hindmost until we get it.)

So we got the doll and took it home. Once home, the doll unpackaged and in my arms, my mom asked me what I wanted to name the doll.

Icky.

She tried to persuade me otherwise, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted that doll. That doll's name was Icky. That was the end of that.

Icky passed down through my hands to my sisters (who are both younger then I am).

Now, my sisters were notorious doll serial killers. Their dolls are long gone.

I like to imagine some archeologist excavating the old ranch site a hundred years from now coming on a succession of dolls buried in a cluster of shallow graves on the wind swept plains, surrounded by an honor guard of lost green plastic army men.

But somehow, Icky made it through the trial and tribulations of a household of wild little Indian kids and all their friends and cousins.

I like to think he is enjoying his retirement, sitting there in a rocking chair, on that ranch on the plains of South Dakota. I take a lot of comfort from that.