If you’ve ever been to Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida then you too may have gone on the brilliant Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride multiple times. It’s set in the 1930s and takes you into the fifth dimension.
I believe a recent trip to Italy with all my family may actually have taken me into the sixth dimension. Upon reflection, I think it might even have been the seventh dimension.
You enter an elevator in the Tower of Terror hotel where an entire family once disappeared in an unsolved paranormal mystery.
The lift ratchets up the shaft, doors opening on every floor, and as they slide open all the lights start to strobe and there suddenly before you, at the end of the corridor, are the missing family – well their holographs – a bit like Abba Voyage but with terrified, panicked and anguished faces, and instead of Dancing Queen you hear the theme music from The Twilight Zone.
Anyway, park all that for the moment. A few weekends ago my family had an oh-so-joyous simchah as a relative was getting married in Florence and we all booked ourselves a short stay there. My parents announced that since so many of the family were going that they too would go. Though my mother needs a wheelchair and my dad is 93 and oh-so-frail, my mother said it would be manageable with so many of us to help. “It will be so easy for you all” are the exact words she used. The first oh-so-easy thing, once we’d actually arrived in Florence (my dad having done his usual disappearing acts at the airports), was trying to access our city centre accommodation. We had to park my parents outside the apartments and go to a hotel ten minutes away to check in and get the key. By the time we returned, although we’d left them with strict instructions to stay put, they had disappeared. Eventually we located my mother in the middle of the piazza dancing to a live band’s Ciao Bello and then we finally found my dad on the other side of square having his portrait painted by a street artist who next attempted to demand a ransom from us.
My dad walks very slowly – excruciatingly slowly – and needs frequent rests. (All the more mysterious that you blink and he vanishes.) Anyway, we borrowed another wheelchair and bundled him into it, against his will, pretending it was compulsory for all nonagenarians in Florence.
We spent the weekend pushing the two of them around the oh-so-delightfully cobbled streets of Florence. My mother screaming and cursing every time the wheels snagged on a cobblestone.
The wedding was lovely. Two identical, unrelated, jolly American rabbis officiated. They introduced themselves but were indistinguishable from one another. I nicknamed them Ant and Dec. Although, my boyfriend and my niece both insisted they’d thought of that first. (Definitely me.)
At the Academia Gallery my mother was a bit too thrilled by Michelangelo’s David, and all the other naked men, and my dad escaped from his wheelchair only to be found examining the fire extinguisher which he then tapped approvingly, nodding.
Checking out, we left our accommodation and trudged with all our luggage, pushing my grumbling parents on the cobblestones – Mum cursing the Florentine street architects for their stupidity all the way to the reception – on the fourth floor of the hotel where we had to return our keys.
Now, I’m not entirely sure how this happened but my dad somehow got into the lift alone and stood there with all the luggage, and disappeared. How and why all the luggage got in the lift we will never know. Mum sat stranded in her wheelchair downstairs, and the rest of us were running up and down the four flights of stairs looking for my dad, squabbling about trying to organise airport taxis, checkouts and the return of Dad’s borrowed wheelchair.
Exasperated taxis drove off to cacophonies of blaring horns on the very narrow road outside the hotel entrance, but we couldn’t get my dad out of the lift. Up and down he went in the ancient lift. Every now and then the doors slid open and the lights strobed and my mother would scream. It was our own Tuscan Tower of Terror. Mansoor style.
My poor old dad was like a ghostly apparition, mouth opening in silent confusion, as if about to ask for help, or enquire what might be happening and whether this was his life now. But before he could speak the doors would slide close and the lift would clunk away, my mother screaming “MENAHEM!” as though aliens had abducted him, while the rest of us shot up the stairs to try and find him on the next levels. This went on for 15 minutes. Thank heavens our flight was delayed.
And, it was me who first said Ant and Dec.
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.