Bedknobs, Broomsticks, and Big Boy Sundaes
I didn’t know it at the time, but May 7, 1979 was one of those rare days when both of my parents’ calendars lined up and we got something like a holiday.
Mom’s journal says:
“Today was Keith’s day off… I washed and cleaned in the morning while Keith and the kids were outside… baked chicken for supper… I gave the kids a bath and we all got cleaned up and went to the movie Walt Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks. After the movie we went to Marc’s Big Boy and had ice cream sundaes — what a glorious day we all had together.”
On my side of the memory, the plot of Bedknobs and Broomsticks barely registers. What I remember instead are fragments:
- The feeling of being chosen for a special outing, scrubbed clean and zipped into “good” clothes.
- Sitting between my parents in the dark, their shoulders like bookends on either side of me.
- Helen’s little legs not quite reaching the floor, swinging above the sticky theater carpet.
- The way the screen light flickered off Mom’s glasses when she laughed.
The movie itself was pure magic: beds that flew, armor that marched, spells that made ordinary objects wake up. For a farm kid whose universe was barns, sand piles, and goat pens, this was the same magic I knew—just with a British accent and a bigger budget.
Afterward, Big Boy was its own kind of enchantment. Vinyl booths. A laminated menu I couldn’t quite read but pretended to. Mom and Dad both relaxed in a way I mostly saw at home after chores were done and the evening Bible reading was finished. Here, they looked like other parents I saw in public—young, laughing, a little tired but happy.
I remember the sundae more than any sermon from that season of life:
- Cold vanilla ice cream in a sweating glass dish.
- Hot fudge that never quite mixed in, just marbled.
- Dad stealing one bite “to make sure it’s safe,” which made me feel like the joke was ours.
Looking back, it strikes me that this is exactly the sort of day my adult self is always trying to recreate for my own kid: a simple arc of chores → nap → movie → ice cream, wrapped in the feeling that—for this one day—time belonged to us, not to a time clock or a shift schedule.
For Mom it was a “glorious day.” For me, it was proof that sometimes the magic wasn’t just on the screen.