Disneyland

They were dear and very old friends from my London days, there were two of them, and they’d rented a car.

Photo by Toni Pomar on Unsplash

“What do you want to do while you’re here?” I asked them on the first evening of their stay.

“The thing we most want to do,” they said, “is go to Disneyland.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, because it’s a fun trip for those who like it, and very Los Angeles, and, dearly as I love spending a week entertaining my English friends, I am also not entirely horrified by the prospect of having a day to myself along the way. “Which day do you plan to go?”

“Which day are you free?” they said.

“I think I’ll let you guys do that one on your own,” I said. There are two sorts of people living in Los Angeles, those who love The Happiest Place on Earth and those who do not; and, intending not a shred of disrespect to those in the former camp, I happen personally to fall squarely into the latter. “It’s a straight shot down the freeway to get to, and Mr. Los Angeles can tell you the best things to do while you’re there.”

“Oh, we couldn’t go without you,” they said. “That would be rude.”

“It wouldn’t be rude at all,” I said. “You want to go and I don’t. You have your own car and each other, so go for it.”

“It would be rude,” they said, firmly, and that was that.

The next morning we had breakfast on the patio.

“What do you want to do today?” I said.

The husband looked at the wife and winked, which in a certain sort of Englishman is a sign that he is about to say something which might, or then again, given the curious nature of the English male’s sense of humor, just as easily might not, be a joke.

“What we really want to do,” he said, “is go to Disneyland. We were really looking forward to going to Disneyland.”

I love my friends, I enjoy their company and wish them nothing but good things; but as a conversational thread this was beginning to grow just the smallest bit weary.

“You can go there very easily,” I said. “You have a car, it’s very simple to get to, you can spend as much time there as you want to, and when you come back here afterwards, I’ll have dinner waiting for you.”

“I think a good hostess would go with us,” said the husband. He sat back, sipped at the juice that his hostess had squeezed from her best friend’s oranges, contemplated the remains of the eggs that his hostess had lightly scrambled to order, the bread that his hostess had brought back from the local bakery and toasted, and the strawberries and cantaloupe melon that his hostess had procured at the Farmers Market, and winked at his wife again to show that he might – or on the other hand might not – be only joking. “I think if we had a hostess worthy of the name,” he expanded, “she’d understand that we can’t go without her because we are good guests and don’t want to be rude.”

“But, you see, I wouldn’t think it rude,” I said. “If you went without me, I wouldn’t mind in the least. I’d be happy,” I added, striving not to betray too unseemly a level of enthusiasm at the notion, “to know you were out there enjoying yourselves.”

But the husband was on a roll.

“I think if we had a good hostess,” he said, “she’d come with us so that we could all go together. We’re only in Los Angeles this once, and Disneyland’s the thing we want most of all to see. I think a caring hostess would respect that and find the time go there with us.”

I’ve known the husband since he and I were 18 years old.

“Then call me the hostess with the leastest,” I said. “What do you want to do that doesn’t involve my going to Disneyland?”

In the end we had an action-packed and enjoyable week together. We went to Hollywood. We went to the beach. We went to the big Wednesday Farmers Market in Santa Monica and bought flowers and tomatoes and fresh peaches. We went to Beverly Hills and gawped at the prices in the stores and at the plastic surgery on the streets. We met up with a friend at a movie studio and saw The Rock eating a salad in the commissary. One day we drove down the coast to San Diego and had lunch in the hotel where Some Like It Hot was filmed.

“Thank you,” said the wife when I bade them good-bye at the end of their visit. “That was a lot of fun and we had a really lovely time.”

The husband winked again, as he had, reliably, each and every morning and each and every evening of their entire trip. “Except for not seeing Disneyland,” he noted, as he had noted – probably, although not absolutely certainly only jokingly – on each and every such occasion. “We’d been so much looking forward to seeing Disneyland, and now I suppose we never will. If only we’d had a hostess who cared about us enough to want to make us happy, she’d have let us go there.”

“You could have gone to Disneyland,” I said. “Any day you wanted.”

The husband sighed just a little and shook his head.

“But we couldn’t have gone without you,” he explained, patiently. “It would have been rude.”