Hello old friend. I can say that with a wink of course because, among the special things you and I share, your birthday is always one year, one month and one day after mine. So, yes, we are both metaphorically and empirically OLD friends. You seem to be well. To be honest, I didn’t come and look closely at the part of you that sits on the ground at the intersection of Katella and Harbor Blvd this week., but I keep tabs on you. That physical address is only “part” of you, of course. The painstakingly designed buildings and sets, the beloved and cherished landscaping, and the ever-evolving ways that your rides and attractions tell stories are important but they’re only the surface. More of you is made of deftly applied layers of smells, sights, sounds, touches and memories laid down over 70 years like thin applications of well-applied varnish on the weathered wood of generations of us, sanded lightly in between coats by our Other Than Disneyland lives.

You and I are long standing pals. You were my first playground-only a few blocks from my house on the corner of Lemon St. and Camden. My dad was part of your Cast, so you and I got to play more often than most. Our greeting ritual was always the same: the drifting sound of music, and the Town Square “reveal” when I stepped through the archway under the Main Street train station punctuated by the smells. Oh man..those aromas! Flower blossoms, popcorn of course, , and a faint hint of spent steam from a locomotive pulling out for its Grand circle Tour. Another couple hundred feet and then its vanilla from the candy shop counter-posed by eau de Horse on Main Street in those days. Now, the ragtime piano from Coke Corner sets the stage for my launch into…my own mind.

Sure, I had several well-practiced courses of travel to choose from. One favorite was the headlong sprint to Tomorrowland and the requisite phone call to mom from the miraculous “hands free” AT&T phone booth (“Hey Mom, it’s me, and I’m NOT HOLDING A RECEIVER!). Now that we’re there, bang on up to the Astrojets for an aerial survey and then straight to the Flying Saucers, fully steeped in the knowledge that I had superior piloting skills. The Moon Ride? Why not, hadn’t I actually met Werner Von Braun there once? (maybe I just saw him but still…) The Sub Lagoon? Yep. Cool, dark-ish and personal. And from there-the rest of the park awaits. That was a favorite  strategy for you and I but we both know that the most likely plan was built around The Rivers of America. First, top speed across the Hub, through the castle and up to the window at the Fantasyland central ticket booth to say hi to someone we called “Aunt Ruth”. She was a neighbor and that was her perennial duty station. Her smiling greeting was our authorization to plunge on. If you’re gonna conquer all of Tom Sawyer’s Island, you have to do recon first from the upper deck of the Mark Twain. Back then, checking in on Rainbow Ridge aboard the Mine Train was another strategic prerequisite. Satisfied with the lay of the land, me and the Lemon Street Gang carefully selected our Raft (not every raft was acceptable. The name mattered.) Once our tennis shoe clad hooves touched the packed dirt of the first island path, the next 5 hours of adventure were ordained; full of hide- and-seek, mud puddles, rocks to leap from, skinned knees and more than one foray off the path into the forbidden out-of-bounds territory of a landscape straight out of Twain’s best wordsmithery.

You and I had limitless adventure potential with each other. Every visit unlocked a version of “Hey, what if we…”  and you always said “WE SHOULD! GO!” Every new plan was punctuated by our secrets-like that place by Snow White’s Wishing Well where you could hide from grownups, the most fun machines in the Penny Arcade and the little known fact that the very best part of Pirates of The Caribbean was the queue that wound around the Blue Bayou restaurant-home of the world’s most amazing lunch-the  Monte Cristo sandwich and those FIREFLIES!

That was always us my friend. It still is of course, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of our life together. But I’m down a rabbit hole here-after all it’s YOUR birthday! With all due respect to your descendants around the world, you are a singularity and a miracle. Despite your imposing and timeless physique, most of you is made of the lifetimes of stories, sensations, hopes, dreams and memories you share with something like 750 million guests. You’re likely to be right there in Anaheim for another hundred years and for that, millions of us who haven’t met you yet are anticipatorily grateful. That said, those of us who do know you, particularly the luckiest among us who can count you as a friend, also know that the greater part of you lives in us. You are not bound by your borders, offering us a brilliant and vital framework over which we pour a rich amalgam of lived and imagined experience, sounds, smells, and a million details seen, heard, touched and considered that ignite into a brilliant, never-the-same-twice, experience of more interesting, colorful and heroic lives we believe are right around the next corner if we can only catch sight of them. You’ve proved for 70 years that dreaming is just fine, that grown-ups don’t have to be, and that, in the words of poet Muriel Rukeyser, “the Universe is Made of Stories”. Thank you old pal, Happy Birthday and many more.