My mother loved Chip and Dale. Not the strip club. The Disney characters. (I still remember, unfortunately, the silly chipmunk refrain: Nuts for you and nuts for me, but best of all the nuts are free!). We never missed Peter Pan or the (non-Disney) Wizard of Oz when they were televised in the 1950s and ​‘60s. And she always clapped for Tinker Bell’s recovery. She probably cried during Bambi, but I wouldn’t know, because she never let me watch it. Too sad, she said. But we both cried when Jiminy Cricket sang ​“When You Wish Upon a Star”in Pinocchio.

She loved camping and Broadway musicals and other people’s kids and cats. Mostly, she loved the Magic Kingdom that Walt Disney had created. The three of us went to Walt Disney World often after my parents moved to Florida in the late 1970s. We waited in astonishingly long lines in the January cold and the sizzling summer sun. We bought ourselves Mickey Mouse ears and posed for Daddy. My mother is the only human being I know who actually chose to take a second ride on It’s a Small World. She absolutely loved it. The song is, distressingly, still stuck in my head more than 50 years later. You’re welcome.

My mother was a child at heart. She loved hair-raising rides, like the Bobsled and Parachute Jump at Coney Island or any tin bucket ride across a raging water-filled ravine. My father and I rolled our eyes and mostly went with it.

I’ve come to believe that she longed to live in Fantasyland, because real life was hard for her. She died way too young (64), and the last time I saw her genuinely happy was when, in her morphine-induced state, she thought she heard music from the Broadway musical, The Most Happy Fella playing through her hospital bed sound system. She was dead from lung cancer a few short weeks later.

I grew up on Disney and have a warm spot in my heart for the many feathered, feline, porcine and Rodentia characters that got me through my childhood. And, in much the same way that my mother lived for and loved escapes, I long to have a butter beer on Diagon Alley, attend a Yule Ball or ask the Sorting Hat where I really belong. Sometimes fantasy is the only way to go.