My two older brothers took my mom to Orlando for some Disney frolicking recently. A couple of weeks before this adventure, Mom and I were talking about her experiences with Disneyworld on previous visits. I remembered that she once brought my two kids beach towels featuring (separately) Aladdin and Snow White. She remembered watching a man walk through Disneyworld trying to excise the irritating tag out of the back of his shirt with a nail file.

She made the observation:

“You think it’s exciting to go to Disneyworld, and then it turns out not to be all that much fun. The moral of the story is to wear an old shirt to Disneyworld.”

I assume she took her own advice. Afterward Mom gushed to me rather joyfully about having the opportunity to hang with numbers one and two sons. And my eldest brother observed, “In the abstract, it sounds almost cruel to subject an 86-year old to a Disney park, where the main activity is waiting in line. We had one line wait that was 85 minutes, and she complained not a whit.

That’s my amazing mom, a font of life lessons of all varieties.