M is MOTF (Man of the Future)

A fish out of water would have a better chance of surviving if it had lungs and walked upright like a…

 My father is speaking to me.  The voice is small and sounds like drops of rain when they hit a thin sheet of metal.  Tin, tin, tin, drip, drip, drip through the ear piece of the phone.  My father’s voice is comforting to me at this time in my life.  He is complaining.  I have heard all these words before but the image of the dialog striking a corrugated metal surface and the resulting rivulets of water that flow into my being create camaraderie that would easily be recognized by survivors of a natural disaster.

He doesn’t like sending Christmas cards anymore.  “What’s the point”, he laments.  “I don’t know any of these people so why should I send them Christmas cards?”.  He then tells me a story about someone he knew from working at Disneyland.  He was one of the very few people my father worked with during his long tenure in the park that had managed to be fired from his ride operator job at the ‘happiest place on earth’.  “The guy sends me a Christmas card every year”, he says.  “Why did this guy get fired?” I asked.  “The guy threw some water at one of the guests on the ride one day", my father chuckled.

It was the Christmas story I had been waiting for.  The complaining rain that had been dripping into my indifferent brain suddenly became a tale mundane activity that suddenly had taken a seemingly random path of sub-atomic proportions that ultimately ended one man’s Disneyland ride operator career.  The stage for this event was an amusement park ride called Innerspace.  The ride was suppose to have the effect of making the rider feel as if he or she was suddenly reduced to an impossible to imagine size such as that of a drop of water, a single molecule of H2O or even a lonely electron circling for eternity around a neutron particle.  The ride was located in an area of the park called "Tomorrowland". It was the result of a successful collaboration between the Imagineers of Disney productions and the Monsanto Corporation.  Monsanto had also been the sponsor for another Disney favorite, the ‘House of the Future’. This was a futuristic vision where visitors to Disneyland could walk through a very convincing, full-scale model of the house of the 'future'.  I occasionally wondered what the "Man of the Future" would look like as I walked through this Disney-constructed and Monsanto Corporation-designed future. I like to think now that the 'Man of the Future' might have looked much like my personal vision I carry around with me today - MOTF.