Don’t know what brought this to mind. I don’t even know empirically that it’s true, I was too young to remember it, or really understand its significance if I did. It’s a story my father told for many years.
My uncle, the man who married one of my mother’s sisters, had a job that required him to travel to exotic locations, sometimes for long periods. Sometimes he left his family in the US, sometimes they moved with him to far-flung lands, and not infrequently there were gaps here and there, ranging from a few to several weeks, and sometimes when that happened they’d crash with us. This threw me together with their daughter, my cousin, who entertained herself when she got bored by getting me into trouble with our parents, generally with great success. I was an only child at the time and had no experience with siblings or interacting with girls, virtually no experience with duplicity. I was terribly naive and hopelessly sincere, and it must have been too tempting not to take advantage of that.
One time when we were together we were raptly watching Walt Disney’s Cinderella on TV.
You have to understand that this was long before VHS, when all television was what now is starting to be called “appointment television”. There was no way to record or time-shift anything, and any feature film being aired was quite an event. For many years pretty much the only time that happened was NBC’s “Saturday Night at the Movies”, one film on one network per week, so seeing Cinderella was something special. Back then when a movie was being shown on TV it was important enough to actually watch the movie, to actually give it your attention, not chatter over it, ignore it while doing something else, or constantly leave the room and return.
According to my father both of us, my girl-cousin and myself, watched the entire film with great intensity, and when it ended we both turned to him with questions.
My girl-cousin asked “Did they really live happily ever after?”.
I asked “How did that wand work?”.
Still there, after all these decades. Tell me how the magic/tech actually works, I’ll take care of all that other stuff, thanks.
– Robert the Wombat