You think. You wink. You do a double blink. You close your eyes...and jump!

When I was a kid, I thought movies were real. I don't mean real like they existed in the world but real like they could REALLY HAPPEN. I thought there were Gremlins hiding under my bed. I kept my eyes peeled in case E.T. showed up in my backyard. I tried clicking my heels three times to see if I would be magically transported home. I thought maybe animals could talk, but I just wasn't listening right. Most of all? I thought it was totally possible that I could fly if I tried hard enough.

I can't tell you how many times I tried to think happy thoughts and fly, my eyes screwed shut, fists clenched tight, jumping off of the top bunk and being shocked that I thumped to the floor instead of soaring through the air.

Seriously, every time my attempts to fly failed, I was SO SURPRISED. I thought I was just doing something wrong. I figured my thoughts weren't happy enough, so I thought of puppies and ice cream and Christmas and SNOW DAYS but still nothing. It was quite traumatizing. I even tried to launch myself off of things. Once, I stood on one end of a teeter totter and told my friend to push down as hard as he could on the other end. In my mind, I saw myself shooting into the air and assumed I would just KNOW how to fly once I was up there. This is what happened instead: my friend pushed on the upright end of the teeter totter, I slipped off of the other end and hit my head on the ground REALLY HARD.

You'd think this would have knocked some sense into me, but no. I was still determined to fly. When I saw The Rocketeer, I thought maybe I just needed a jet pack to fly but my parents wouldn't buy me one. Probably a pretty good idea considering I couldn't even avoid serious head trauma on a teeter totter.

I needed something safer than a jetpack, but more powerful than my apparently subpar happy thoughts. Finally it hit me: an umbrella!

Because, duh, Mary Poppins totally flew around with just an umbrella! And since Mary Poppins was OBVIOUSLY A REAL PERSON, I figured it might work for me, too.

SPOILER ALERT, it didn't work. No matter how many times I tried. And this is why I would like to be transported to Mary Poppins land. I was so jealous of those kids whenever I watched that movie. I was jealous of their British accents and their crazy neighbors, and that even cleaning their room was fun, and that they got to hang out with Mary Poppins all day long. Not only that, but they could dive into sidewalk drawings and fly (OK, float) just by laughing! I tried laughing as hard as I could and I NEVER floated up to the ceiling. You know what else never happened? My horse never jumped off the carousel, no matter how much I wished and wished for it.

I suppose a tiny part of me does still believe in the make-believe things, which is why I stock up on happy thoughts, click my heels three times whenever I want to go home (just in cases), and I always, ALWAYS, carry an umbrella.