THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 16, 1994 TAG: 9412150175
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
I've been thinking a lot about my Uncle Sid and my cousin Lee this holiday season. It's something I do whenever I lose a couple of tons of steel and four tires in a parking lot.
The first time I thought about them was when Bill and I misplaced the truck at Lynnhaven Mall one evening last week.
``I know it's here somewhere,'' Bill said as we joined several other dazed shoppers around the parking lot. Eventually we found our little vehicle cowering in fear between a jacked up 4 x 4 and a van the size of a double-wide mobile home.
``That was almost as bad as Sid and Lee at Disneyland,'' I said as Bill started the engine.
We both laughed.
A few days later I had reason to think of my uncle and cousin again.
This time I was shopping alone at Military Circle. I came out of the mall at the exact spot where I had left the car. Or at least thought I did. Either the car or the spot had moved.
For 20 minutes I walked up and down rows. At each corner I would run into a Wilt Chamberlain look-alike circling on foot in the opposite direction.
``Hey, don't feel bad,'' he told me on our third passing. ``I can't find mine either and I can see a lot better from up here than you can from down where you are.''
By the time we passed each other again we were in our vehicles and on our way to the exit and I was once more recalling my Wallace relatives, the ones responsible for what I consider the best of all parking lot stories.
My cousin Lee was a 7-year-old second-grader and I was a college sophomore when Disneyland first opened its magic doors in 1955.
That holiday season I arrived home with a suitcase stuffed with crinolines and ball gowns, a couple of textbooks (props to convince my parents that I was majoring in something more than social life) and an assignment from a child psych professor that involved giving sentence completion tests to 10 elementary school students.
Lee, I decided, would be one of my test subjects.
``OK, Lee,'' I said, adjusting his Mickey Mouse ears so he could hear me, ``you and I are going to play a game.''
For half an hour I read parts of sentences, he finished them and I wrote down his answers.
``I am happiest -,'' I began. ``When my dad takes me to Disneyland,'' he answered.
``After school -,'' I said. ``Is over in June I'll go to Disneyland,'' he popped back.
And so it went through ``my best friend is - Mickey Mouse;'' ``when I grow up I will - own Disneyland'' and ``when people die - they go to visit Snow White.''
``Lee has a problem and I have the answer,'' I told my uncle with the confidence that only a sophomore education major would dare show.
``And what would that be?'' Uncle Sid asked.
``He's obsessed with Disneyland and you've got to take him there as soon as possible,'' I pronounced.
Which, since Sid had never met an amusement park he didn't like, he had no hesitation in going.
A few weeks later he and Lee flew to Los Angeles, rented a car and went to the Magic Kingdom. This, you understand, was in 1956. People took trains in 1956. Or buses. People drove in 1956. Few, if any, took fly-and-drive vacations in those days.
Anyway, Sid and Lee arrived early in the morning at Disneyland, parked their rental car and spent almost every minute the park was open cavorting with Mickey Mouse and riding tea cups and old trains.
An hour before closing time they decided to call it a day and return for more the next morning.
There was only one problem. They had forgotten where they had parked the car.
Make that two problems. They had also forgotten what make, model and color of car they were driving.
For an hour they walked through the lot, trying the keys in any vehicle that looked like a possibility.
Eventually a curious security guard inquired as to what the well dressed businessman and the kid wearing three sets of Mickey Mouse ears were doing.
When they told him their story he had but one suggestion.
``Just sit on that bench over there until the lot empties out then try your key in whatever's left over,'' he instructed them.
Which is what they did.
The next morning Sid bought a red bandana, which he attached to the radio antenna before they entered the park. That evening they took the red eye back to Connecticut.
During my Easter break I gave Lee the sentence completion test again.
As it turned out the trip had done nothing to cure his obsession with Disneyland, but the parking story found its way into our family's lore to be told, retold and embellished for decades to come.
And remembered by each of us whenever we cruise a parking lot in search of whatever it was we were driving when we arrived. by CNB