Just to get rid of her, I walked up to the boy, who, breaking all stamina records, was still crying, and said in Persian, “Are you Iranian?” The boy stopped crying for a moment, then let out the loudest scream heard since biblical times. Not only was he separated from his loved ones, he was now trapped in the Tower of Babel.

Although I was sorry for the little boy, I also felt vindicated. I went back to my coloring book, no longer feeling the urge to cry. I colored a few pages; then, lo and behold, in walked my father, looking completely panicked and breathless. He ran and hugged me and asked me whether I had cried. “Of course not,” I answered. He told me that I had gotten lost just when the group split in two, so an hour went by before anyone noticed I was missing. “I thought you had been kidnapped,” he told me, still out of breath. Timing is key, and I knew this was my moment. “Could we go to the gift shop?” I asked. “Anything you want,” he said, “anything at all.”

We had to leave Disneyland early that day because my father was too weak in the knees to continue. Even the thought of “Pirates of the Caribbean” could not revive him.

We spent the usual half hour looking for our car in the parking lot. I clutched closely two helium balloons, items my father prior to this visit had always called a waste of money and never bought for me, a two-foot-long pencil with scenes from Disneyland, a complete set of miniature plastic Seven Dwarves with their own carrying case, and a Winnie-the-Pooh pencil holder. In the midst of my father’s newfound appreciation for me, I also asked him if he would take me to the Movieland Wax Museum the following week. “Sure,” he said. “Anything you want.”

My father spent the drive home re-creating my actions in his absence.

“So how did you know for sure you were lost?” he asked.

“I couldn’t see you guys,” I answered.

“How did you know whom to go to?” he continued.

“I looked for someone who worked there.”

“How did you know he worked there and he wasn’t just standing around looking for lost kids?”

“He had the same outfit as the other six people around him and he had a name tag.”

“A name tag, huh? Very clever.”

I knew what he was thinking. Thanks to Mickey, I had been elevated from child-who-can’t-learn-to-swim to child genius.