On a trip to Disneyland, my son Riley looks up to me, smiling with a string of mucus connecting his nostril to his cheek, pink crystal residue of cotton candy on his lips, arms over his head, grubby fingers reaching. He wants to be carried. I lift him.

I always lift him. Times like this when he’s cute, happy, and thankful. Times when he’s angry, and I worry about the subtext I’m enabling his entitlement, the grimace on his face implying I should’ve known to have lifted him already, that I shouldn’t have forced him to walk so long that he tired his little legs. I probably give in to carrying him more often than I should now that he’s five and capable of walking much longer than he wants to, besides which he’s forty-five pounds and my shoulder sockets ache by the time we return to the hotel.

But I watched a reel on Facebook about parents trying to remember the last times they picked up their children. Hardly any of them could remember with any precision, and I’m skeptical of the few who could remember—surely they passed off guesses or composites as the real thing. A time of not carrying Riley feels impossibly far away, and yet as I approach middle-age, the idea of my hundred-ish pound mother, my hundred-fifty-ish pound father trying to haul around my two-hundred-ish pound body is laughable. The truth is, though I know they each must have carried me plenty of times, I can’t remember a single instance.

I want Riley to remember.

Neither of us will remember the specific last time, I assume. But I want us both to haveplenty of memories.

He might not so much remember being carried as remember the sensation of magic at the park. That we rode Ariel’s Undersea Adventure no fewer than eleven times and that we let him eat chicken nuggets and French fries for five meals in a span of seventy-two hours. That somehow his feet didn’t hurt after so much time walking around.

We line up for Snow White’s Scary Adventures, but the ride breaks down. We’re close enough to the front not to abandon hope. If the ride does start up again soon, we’ll be a couple minutes from boarding as opposed to starting from scratch—conservatively, a half-hour wait. From the exit point of the ride emerges an employee (Disney vernacular would call him a cast member, but I reject this in a similar vein to how I balk at the nomenclature of Starbucks drinks sizes—Tall, Grande, Venti—for my instinct that applying branding to basic vocabulary is abstractly insidious, or at least dumb). The employee dons a white pirate shirt like something Captain Hook would wear and forest green capris more like Peter Pan. A Korean family follows her. The girl—older than Riley—wears an orange-cream dress and a tiara over sneakers with the little wheels on the heels that allow her roll through steps, though her mother puts a hand on her shoulder, I think to discourage this choice. They’re walking unfamiliar ground, out of the shadows of the ride, through spaces where people aren’t supposed to walk, barring a ride evacuation like this. The girl’s father wears a black t-shirt with white print that reads Princess Security.

“That’s the dream,” my wife, Heather, says. She elaborates, the dream is to be on the ride when it breaks down, to have the opportunity to walk through spaces visitors typically can’t access, maybe even reach out and touch one of the animatronics. It seems like an awfully modest dream to me, but it speaks to the volume of times we’ve been to the park. Come once, and you want your ride to work as planned. Buy an annual pass and by the third or fourth trip, you crave an anomaly.

We watch a mechanic arrive on the scene. Not a cast member, not pretending to be anything, but rather clad in a rumpled blue work shirt. He is joyless as he sits in a mine car and directs the cast member at the controls to drive him inward—the most efficient way to get at whatever problem awaits him.

While we wait, I steal a look at my phone. I’m part of a Facebook group dedicated to annual passholders, ostensibly to track if people share information about attractions we’d planned to visit or one of the parking garages being shutdown, but most of the time I spend on the group is dedicated to reading stupid questions answered by mean-spirited comments, then tracking the bickering that ensues. It’s cringey yet entertaining in an embarrassing way, like reality television. A moderator posts every couple weeks about a zero tolerance policy for rudeness on the page, but the dynamics never change.

There’s something different posted this time, though. A reshare from another group catered toward Disney Moms, but not necessarily ones who hold annual passes. There’s a picture of a small stuffed elephant next to a picture of a small child. At first, I think this child lost his stuffie at the park. Then, I realize the stuffie is the child—rather the child is gone and the parents sewed his ashes into this elephant and took him along for a trip to the place where he was happiest. Except they misplaced the elephant, and now the family is spreading the word across every social media outlet they can find to find it. Him. I show Heather the post, and we’re both a little misty-eyed about it. Riley asks to see the phone and I let him, but he doesn’t know how to read, and we aren’t about to explain about the ashes, so he goes on stretching his arm in front of his face like a trunk and making elephant sounds, and I’m thankful we’re in a place in which a small child imitating an elephant is socially acceptable.

I think of the Lidia Yuknavitch essay “Ashes,” in which she discusses trying to leave her baby’s ashes in the ocean and the veritable comedy of errors that ensue when the box they’re in won’t float away. It keeps coming back, so finally she takes the remains out of the box, wades waist-deep in the water, and tries to leave them there. Still, half of the ashes cling to her coat and I think it’s a metaphor about how hard it is to let go. Yuknavitch resists sentimentality, capturing the messiness of laughing through tears that are all mixed up with salt water and mist.

Heather mentions her friend and the baby that never came, the heartbeat vanished during the second trimester. The friend hasn’t expelled the fetus yet and has a prescription to help with that. If the medicine doesn’t work, she’ll be in line for a surgery that some especially abortion- averse states wouldn’t allow.

I have another friend who lost a baby. I wrote to her, the Mother’s Day after the loss to let her know I was thinking of her. I wrote a lot of things. I take pride in being a writer who goes there in writing about uncomfortable subject matter like sex and violence, but I think the same qualities contribute to me being an awkward friend. I wrote my friend about how close we came to losing Riley, because he stopped growing in his third trimester and that led to scenes of me injecting Heather with nightly blood thinners, then going to the bathroom so I could cry without her having to think she had to console me.

I don’t know that I’d have had the strength to weather it if we’d lost Riley then. I’d had abstract fantasies about my nihilistic future. One bank robbing daydream I remember, in particular, because what else would I have to lose? What did I owe the world?

I think of all this and think it’s a small thing to carry Riley a while longer.

We get on Snow White and ride it all the way through. We ride a lot of rides. I want him to have these memories.

And when we’re on Ariel’s Undersea Adventure again, the voice of Sebastian the crab cuts in over the music, to say, What’s this? You’ve come to a stop! Hmm...maybe it’s that sea witch. Listen to me—stay seated in your clamshell while I get to the bottom of this. In other words, the ride breaks down. Maybe it’s the early summer heat. Maybe the early summer crowds, bearing the weight of so many parkgoers, so many hours. We’re at the part where a thirty-second loop of “Under the Sea” plays on repeat and a cast of fish swim-dance to the notion that it’s better down where it’s wetter. We aren’t getting Heather’s dream of a walk-off during the ride—it seems the ride isn’t that badly broken—but I think Riley enjoys this moment just the same for the opportunity to study each spinning starfish, the big purple octopus that rotates, the clams popping out of their shells at intervals.

I take all this in, too. But I mostly watch Riley. We’re frozen in time.

I feel a little sad when our big clamshell lurches into motion again.

There’s no point in wishing for time to freeze, I know, any more than there’s sense in trying to take candid photos of Riley in his dancing, hopping, state of glee after the ride, each shot a blur.

Still, I try.

Riley lifts his arms to me again. Smiling again.

I tuck away the phone, so I have both hands free to carry him.