Disney, Dads and Dying

On Love

No one having experienced love would conjure up evolution. 

We left Jackson yesterday morning at 4:12 a.m. temperature 1° in my baby girl's car no bigger than the Command Module above the Apollo rocket.  It was dark and bitter cold like my heart.  I pointed the little rocket south and we raced into the unknown listening to The Little Mermaid singing “I’ve got whozits and whatzits galore…” There are some things fathers do that are as unnatural as death and I was doing one, I was taking my baby to Disney World in Orlando Florida where she will start her Disney College Internship.  To young girls just turning 20 Disney World is every movie they’ve ever seen, every damsel in distress, every Prince Charming, every dance at The Ball, it is, quite literally, A Magic Kingdom.  To a stooped over broken down old father its just another dangerous place far from his protective arm.  The car was dark and quiet now except for the muffled roar of the engine doing 80 mph, half its speedometer claim.  Some Disney movie tune played softly and Betty and Sarah were asleep.  These are those dark moments that fathers have that never get spoken of, mean thoughts, primeval, born before Eden, when “human father” was just being thought up in the Deep Reaches of God’s Eternal Eternity.  I slowly slipped into Eternity, into the deep recesses of fatherhood.  What would I trade for the safety and security of my baby girl?  All humans on earth except Bensons, blood Bensons.  All humanity would perish at by command if that were the cost of my baby girl.  And deeper still.  All Bensons, blood Bensons over thirty would go next and then it would come down to all of us to age twenty.   And then what, a dozen or so human’s left in the entire cosmos… “wanderin’ free, wish I could be, part of that world”  I was rescued from the primal state of life and death by a red haired little angel singing a love song.  She was just like my little girl; she wanted to live out her dream, to walk on her on two feet, “part of that world.”  It reminded me of another song of my youth.  “Well another man might have been angry and another man might have been hurt, but another man never would of let her go.   I STASHED THE BILL IN MY SHIRT.”   I clung to the wheel of her little rocket, gritted my teeth in resignation and raced off into the night holding desperately to God!!!

No one experiencing love could ever conjure up evolution.