Fast Pass

My family and I just got back from a week long vacation to Walt Disney World.  My daughters are 10 and 6 years old, and as far as I am concerned, the absolute perfect ages for The Mouse House.  My youngest is still little enough that everything she sees is magical—that Snow White is THE Snow White, Tinker Bell REALLY flies at the beginning of the fireworks each night, that ghost on the top of our “doom buggy” really is swapping her head for his.  My oldest is in the “girls rule and boys drool” phase of her life.  She knows that Tinkle Bell is really just riding a zip line and the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion are projections; however, she is still young enough that she forgets to be cool sometimes.  There were moments when she walked around a corner to see a character that she wasn’t expecting to be there and break into a huge smile and squeal or without thinking she would start dancing to the music during a parade.  Coming home I realized that the REAL magic of Walt Disney World is the experience it gives the parents.  We got to spend a week watching our children believe that there is magic in the world and then come home realizing that the “magic” was them all along.  It really was such a special trip.

Ok, ok…I know what you are thinking.  I am glossing over the crowds, the heat, the over-priced food, the overtired kids, the LINES…I know, I know.  However, I honestly feel that those things are the price you pay.  Nothing worth having comes free…and the memories that our family will always have of this trip are defiantly worth having, even at that price.  One thing that Disney has instituted that has helped lessen the worst of the blows is The Fast Pass.  For those of you who haven’t been to WDW in a while may not have heard of this, so here’s the deal: The Fast Pass is a pass that gives you a specific time to come back to a ride, bypass most of the line, and hop onto your favorite ride cutting your wait time at the VERY least in half.  “Too good to be true,” you say?  Well, there are some stipulations.  You can only hold one fast pass at a time and cant get a new one until it is past your return time printed on your pass, which, really isn’t that big of a deal.  Most times, you can schedule it so that you get your pass time, go stand in line for another ride, come back just in time to breeze on to your Fast Pass ride, and then get a new pass for the next ride of your choice.  The real secret is to get there early and Fast Pass the rides that are notorious for really long wait times: Space Mountain, Expedition Everest, The Test Track, Splash Mountain, etc. 

I wish I could adequately explain the feeling the Fast Pass gives you.  It is this intoxicatingly strange combination of excitement, arrogance, freedom, barely contained glee…and, to some degree, guilt.  Rushing up those isles, past the bright red faces of heat exhausted children and their parents with their thinly veiled hatred for you at that exact moment as they forget that in just a short time they will become the hated, you really do start to feel badly about your speedy ascension toward whatever endorphin popping experience’s Fast Pass Kiosk that you were clever enough to bee line toward at the beginning of the day was about to provide you.  Now, just as those people that you pass on your “I have a Fast Pass” victory march forget that they will be in your shoes soon, you in turn forget that you will be in theirs.  Those bright red, overheated faced children will be your children.  Those thinly veiled, envy fueled, hateful faces will be your own.  This brings me to the other life lesson that our Walt Disney World vacation taught me:  No matter how clever, organized, or lucky you are, you won’t always the one breezing through on your way to greatness.

By the middle of the week, we had the Fast Pass routine down…or so we thought.  While spending the day in The Animal Kingdom, we decided to Fast Pass the safari ride (animals will be more apt to wander in the morning when it’s cooler) and then Fast Pass Expedition Everest.  Now, Everest is easily the most visibly popular ride at The Animal Kingdom; however, we forgot about the sleeper hit for a summer afternoon: The Rapids.  “Not to worry,” we thought, “we’ll just grab a Fast Pass, go catch The Lion King Show and come back at our assigned time.”  We patted each other on the back at our brilliant planning, knowing that in just a short time we would be on our way down a man made river of white water and receive a wonderfully cool soak for our troubles…one little problem: THE FAST PASS KIOSK WAS CLOSED!! How could this be?  We planned!  We worked the system!  We even sent a runner out ahead of our unit with all of our tickets to ensure no confusion or paper shuffling!  Closed. All the passes for the rapids had been handed out for the day.  So, there we were, in line for over an hour, no end in sight, with no Fast Pass to look forward to on the other side.  Now the challenge came: keeping up the morale and avoiding any mental or emotional break downs.  This is where you separate the men from the…uh, mice… (sorry, couldn’t resist)

All joking aside, we got through it. We were hot.  We were tired. We wanted to jump the divider between the mortals and the fast pass gods, strangle all of the necks attached their happy, normal colored faces and wrestle those FREEDOM ENSURING passes out of their arrogant outstretched hands…but nay, we didn’t.  Because we remembered that just a short, boiling hour ago, we sailed past a 90 minute wait time for Expedition Everest in a record 7 minutes.  While explaining this give and take, get and receive concept to my children, it occurred to me that I needed to remember to apply this to real life back home.  I knew that once we returned from our trip to Fantasy Land, literally, we had a hard reality to face.

Nana has stage 4 lung cancer.  I say “Nana” rather than “My Nana,” because she doesn’t belong to just me…or to just this family, really.  My grandmother is 75 years old, and has spent the majority of those years (minus her first 16 when she wasn’t a wife and mother) as the matriarch of this family.  She has taught her family about everything from civil rights to baking bread, she has wrapped us in her love, fierce protection and quilts for as long as most of us remember while knowing, still, that there are others who remember even further back.  This year on her birthday we celebrated her life and all that she means to us in a presentation full of songs, stories and tears.  Listening to my cousins talk about what Nana has meant to them in their own life made me realize the full scope of what this woman has accomplished using just her tenacity, passion and the wisdom of learning from life’s experiences.  This is a woman who could easily slip from the most avid, insistent civil rights demonstrator to stage diva to cupcake baker with just a change of apron.  She is remarkable.  What she has taught us is remarkable.  What is happening to her, and the knowledge of what is to come, is unbearable.  I keep finding myself looking at other families whose loved ones have less dire prognosis with the same level of distain as I had while looking at those damn Fast Pass holders on the rapids ride…forgetting that not too long ago we were the ones with the Fast Pass.  And, boy, let me tell ya, we sure have been...

Two years ago it was discovered that my daughter’s earlier diagnosis of a non-threatening heart condition was incorrect.  She was in surgery to correct the previous diagnosis when it was realized that what she actually had was a serious, life-threatening condition.  Her little heart had been a ticking time bomb for the previous five years that could have caused her sudden death at any time…and we didn’t even know it until after the whole ordeal was completely over.  When I think about the number of parents who had to endure knowing about this condition for ANY amount of time before their child could be taken into surgery to fix it, I literally shudder.  Five minutes would be too long to worry that your child might just die right in front of you and there would be nothing you could do to save her.  We Fast Passed that.  Big time.

My youngest daughter was tested for cystic fibrosis when she was two years old.  When the results came back positive, my family and I were devastated.  There is no cure for cystic fibrosis and, although medical advancements have come leaps and bounds, there is no such thing as a totally full, long life for the patient.  All I could think was, “I am going to have to bury my child.”  No parent should have feel that, think that, KNOW that, much less do just that.  It simply goes against nature.  Less than 24 hours later her doctor called me at home.  The technician in the lab had misplaced a decimal point.  My daughter was fine.  Fast Pass.

This spring, my Aunt Mimi was diagnosed with a brain tumor that due to the way it was growing was inoperable in some places.  All we could do was pray that they would be able to remove enough, treat enough of it, to keep it from spreading into the sections of her brain that allowed for speech, memory, motor skills, reasoning and that it would be proven to be nonmalignant.  If things didn’t go as we prayed they would, she would be facing an incredibly difficult remainder of her shortened life with very little quality of life.  Today, I am overjoyed to report that she finished her last radiation treatment yesterday, walking out of there in the end with the loss of vision in one eye and a benign tumor that is no longer growing.  All other functions?  As kooky and twisted as before.  In other words…good as new.  Fast Pass.

So, family, I guess it is our turn to wait in the heat with our Nana.  I’m not saying that it is going to be fun.  I’m not saying it is going to be easy.  I’m not even saying that we won’t want to strangle the people we see with Fast Passes at various times.  But, I am saying that we will endure the heat together, the wait together, the frustration and the fear and the anger at the unjustness of it all together…and we will endure the end together.  This will be just like those well planned rides at Disney World—surprises at every turn, some thrilling moments, some scary moments, some moments you can’t wait to be over, some you wish you could do again and again, and, of course, it always ends too soon.  However, when it is all said and done, and I am trying to return to daily life in a world that doesn’t really make total sense anymore, where the words, “fair” and “unfair” don’t really matter, I hope that I remember the parts of the journey that were nothing short of magical.