Before it was used in art, memento mori was a phrase that originated with the ancient Roman practice of a successful general returning from battle being assigned a slave to follow him around, whispering in his ear: “Respice post te. Hominem te memento.”
“Look to the afterlife,” the slave was instructed to say in an effort to help the general avoid haughtiness from all the praise he received in the wake of his victory, “and remember you’re only a man.” Remember, says the world—you must die.
*
“Keep moving,” I’m saying to the kids as we step off the Hogwart’s Express and wind our way through the stanchions that will contain the crowds who show up when they open the gates to all who do not have special early entrance passes. “If you move quickly we can beat the masses.”
I have always been terrible at waiting in line—a trait I certainly inherited from my mother. Even if the Express Pass and early entrance pass hadn’t come included in our resort package, I would have probably sprung for it. Or obtained the necessary paperwork from my doctors to get one for free.
“I’ll sign whatever you need,” Dr. Cavanaugh said when we told her we were surprising the boys with a trip to Universal Studios. “It’s worth it—and you deserve it.”
She took her kids recently. “It’s such a brief window—when they’re old enough to enjoy it all and young enough to enjoy it all, too,” said the busy, world-renown oncologist. “You’ll have fun. You’ll have a complete blast.”
*
I’ve been to the real Portofino—once, on that tumultuous mother/daughter trip at age nineteen when I was learning all about memento mori. I remember the brightly painted buildings, the blue-green of the Riviera. I remember the fishing boats and the smell of coffee brewing.
I remember writing everything back to myself as we waited on the train platform—in a notebook where I had arrogantly etched ars longa, vita brevis: art is long, life is short. Something I had no doubt learned in a creative writing class. No wonder I had annoyed my mother so much. I remember her sitting beside me with her black backpack in her lap, working and reworking stacks of paper with her fingers: our Eurail passes, our lire, our map, our reserved-seat tickets. I remember the cloud of stress embanked around her:
“Don’t talk to me—I’m counting! If you want to ever make it to Venice just leave me alone right now!”
*
Universal’s Portofino Bay Hotel: a re-creation of a real Italian resort town. It’s hard to keep track of the different levels of artifice here, and in some ways it reminds me of my own body. It looks intact—lovely, even, on the outside—but you can sense that on the inside something is not right.
The man-made river on which our water taxi transports us to the main entrance of the amusement park is a little greener than blue, with just the slightest tinge of too much chemical. I try to peer into the water for fish or turtles or gators as our gleaming wood hull pushes along the canal, but I cannot see a thing.
As we glide toward the park gates, I am wondering: Does a boat captain for a real boat on a fake canal driving real people to a fake world require a real pilot’s license?
King’s Cross Station—where we catch the Hogwart’s Express on Platform 9 3/4—is another a re-creation of a real place, with impatient crowds and a British ticket-taker and overflowing garbage cans making it entirely believable. A squirrel runs through the stiles.
“Was that a rat?” says Benny, jumping. “Do you think it’s rabid?”
“What?” John exclaims. “That was a squirrel! And no, I don’t think you need to worry about it being rabid.”
John is on edge, and has been consumed all morning with the decision of whether or not to take a Xanax. Given my intake of pain pills, he should probably be at the top of his parenting game. But: Antianxiety meds might just be what gets him there. A bottle of them—and just about every other pill in the world—rattle around in my bag next to our stack of passes.
Hogsmeade, on the other hand, is a very realistic re-creation of a place that does not exist—except vividly in the minds of many visitors. Teenage boys stream past us in black gowns. Four-year-olds and middle-aged women stand together in front of storefronts, working out spells with wands. Freddy has emphatic opinions about restaurants: “I think we should eat at the Three Broomsticks. In the books, it’s excellent.”
The line is very long though, so instead we grab foot-long hotdogs at a stand outside the entrance to Diagon Alley and find a place to rest our feet on some empty steps—only to be asked almost immediately if we would move for a moment by several visitors, so that they could take a picture they have traveled hundreds of miles to snap. It appears we have mistakenly stopped for lunch on the steps of the fa?ade of the London townhome of famed Harry Potter wizard Sirius Black at 12 Grimmauld Place.
“Excuse me,” says a tween in braces as she edges up next to me on the stoop. “I’m so sorry. I just really need to see if there is any chance that this door opens to somewhere.”
How can you deny someone led by this instinct? I know it doesn’t open, but I move my bag of potato chips out of the way. She knocks and pulls hard on the latch. After two tries, when nothing gives, she shrugs and smiles—rejoining her family and moving back into the throngs.
*
In the same way my fingers keep sifting through our various passes and tickets, my brain keeps trying to sort the levels of surrealness. Everywhere, quartets just like ours—and my family growing up—make their way. And in many of these little units, one member looks possibly unwell: functioning, but with something in their eyes that suggests the glimmer of the underneath.
As we thread toward the park exit that afternoon, the Minions ride has a one-hundred-and ten-minute wait—for those without an Express Pass.
“A hundred and ten minutes,” says John. “That’s just incredible.”
He’s opted against the Xanax after all, but he’s feeling the high of hopping on the water taxi and heading back to Portofino Bay—the unmitigated thrill of a crowd-free afternoon.
*
I was here once before, when I was a year older than Freddy. Well, not here exactly—but at that esteemed amusement park down the road. Charlie was still in a stroller. I can’t stop thinking about my parents. On that trip, they were a couple years older than John and I are now—yet they seemed so much more grown up: my mom stewing in stress, at every moment on the verge of yelling about the location of the traveler’s checks and the free meal coupons for the Contemporary Resort. Everything a fine hair from catastrophe, checking the strapped-on wallet under her pants line with the ritual of an OCD pattern. It was not unlike our trip to Portofino.