In 1964 I was at the University of Arizona and living in Pima Hall, a small, co-op dorm where the 40 girls who lived there did all of our own cooking and cleaning. Each spring we celebrated Little Sister’s Day, and little sisters were invited to come and spend the weekend. My friend, Sharon Jane Brown, and I both had little sisters named Evelyn. That year for Little Sister’s Day the four of us went to see the newly released Mary Poppins. It’s hard to believe that was sixty years ago, but of course I’m eighty now, and my sister, Evelyn Jane, is seventy.

On Wednesday night after a day of doing advance prep for Thanksgiving, I sat down to watch the two-hour ABC special about the making of that movie. One of the highlights was an interview with Dick Van Dyke who’s now 97. The interviewer, while sorting through Mr. Van Dyke’s amazing collection of honors and awards, asked him, how he wanted to be remembered. He replied without hesitation, “I want to be remembered for Mary Poppins.”

The remainder of the program dealt with the difficulties Walt Disney encountered while making his masterpiece. For one thing, it took literally decades for him to wrest the rights to make it from the original author or the Mary Poppins books, PL Travers. She didn’t want to let go of her literary baby and turn it over to someone else. Now, as an author myself, I certainly understand that. She saw Walt Disney as a cartoonist. She didn’t want her beloved character to be turned into a cartoon, and she CERTAINLY didn’t want her work to become a musical. The irony is that Walt Disney had already hired two song-writing brothers, Robert and Richard Sherman, to create music for Mary Poppins long before he had the rights to make the movie.

As a writer, encountering the song writers was another fascinating part of the documentary. When I’m working on a book, things I happen across along the way often end up in that book. While the Shermans were writing the music, one of their sons was in first grade. He came home from school one day and told his dad that he’d been given the Salk polio vaccine. “Wait,” the father said, “Somebody gave you a shot at school without my knowing about it?” “It wasn’t a shot the,” kid replied. “They gave it to us in little paper cups along with cubes of sugar.” That was the inspiration for that classic Mary Poppins song, “Just a Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Medicine Go Down!”

Last night, after all the company left and the last set of dishes and pots and pans were in the dishwashers … (Yes we have two! If the family alone adds up to approximately twenty people, having more than one dishwasher is a really good idea, and please pardon that derailed sentence that inadvertently turned into a sentence fragment! My apologies.) Anyway, after everyone left and the house was quiet, I sat down and watched Mary Poppins all by my lonesome. I was struck by the production values—how the hand-drawn cartoon characters came to life and blended seamlessly with the live characters, all of it done without benefit of CGI—Computer Generator Imagery. The kids snap their fingers, and furniture flies into a dollhouse or books into their arms. It’s magic—very believable magic.

Once I finished watching the movie, I didn’t erase it. This morning, while doing my inside steps, I listened in on my laps through the kitchen while Bill watched Mary Poppins from beginning to end. On the reservation, I learned that stories must end where they begin. That’s what I noticed this morning. The story begins with kite flying gone awry, and it ends, triumphantly, with the song Let’s Go Fly a Kite.

In Dick Van Dyke’s interview, he said he had no idea why Walt Disney chose him for Bert because, he claimed, “I couldn’t dance.” I’m going to take exception to that statement. After watching the movie twice and seeing him dance with a quartet of cartoon penguins in “It’s a Jolly Holiday” and with a whole crew of chimney-sweep dancers in “Step in Time,” I’m here to declare that Dick Van Dyke in his thirties was one hell of a dancer!

And speaking of Dick van Dyke, at the time I saw the movie originally, I was aware that he played Bert, yes, but that he also appeared as the aging patriarch of the stiff-nosed banking family where George Banks worked. The spooky resemblance between the two—the real 97 year-old Dick Van Dyke as he is now and the artificially made up one appearing the movie was amazing and gave me goosebumps

After watching the recording twice, did I erase it? No, I did not, because I believe I’ll want to watch it again. It was heart-lifting and entertaining in a way Disney films no longer are. Walt Disney was an inspired storyteller. He believed in the wonder of innocence. He believed in the magic of joy. The people who are running Disney today seem to have lost track of all that. I suspect they’re a bunch of cynical bean-counters whose dystopian views of life have infected everything they touch, and not in a good way, turning up-lifting comic book heroes into dark-minded, joyless anti-heroes.

It occurs to me that they’d all benefit from a healthy dose of laughter. Maybe someone should sit them down and tell them a joke about “A man named Smith with a wooden leg. So what was the name of his other leg?”

Walt Disney himself would be terribly disappointed by much of what his successors are creating. He was businessman, yes, but he was also an artist. And on the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday be damned, I’m personally thankful for the incredible genius of Walt Disney.