The Day Fair Park Added Me to the Exhibit

A dramatic re-creation of the day Sister Dobson discovered that preschool teaching occasionally included lagoon retrieval

When I was in preschool, I fell into the lagoon at Fair Park.

That is the whole sentence, and honestly, it deserves a moment.

I do not remember the lesson plan. I do not remember which museum we visited. I do not remember whether we were there for the aquarium, the science museum, the natural history museum, or some combination of Dallas educational buildings designed to make small children walk in a line and become better citizens against their will.

What I remember is water.

And then, unfortunately, being in it.

I had seen Splash as a kid, so perhaps that gave me an unrealistic impression of how casually a person could enter water and still have everything turn out charming. The beginning of that movie has a cheerful “Wooly Bully” energy, which is an unusually upbeat way to begin a story that later spends a surprising amount of time with Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks looking deeply unhappy in tanks.

Maybe I absorbed the wrong lesson.

Maybe I thought water was whimsical.

Maybe I had heat stroke and was operating under lagoon-based delusions.

Maybe I wanted to test Sister Dobson’s reflexes, because apparently preschool field trips were also emergency-preparedness drills.

Whatever the reason, at some point I went from being a child near the Fair Park lagoon to being a child in the Fair Park lagoon. This is an important distinction that most field-trip permission slips probably do not cover.

I wish I could explain the exact mechanics of the fall. I cannot.

Maybe I slipped. Maybe I leaned too far. Maybe I was investigating something in the water with the confidence of a scientist and the motor skills of a damp sock. Preschoolers are not known for maintaining a thoughtful relationship with edges.

What I do know is that falling into a lagoon during a field trip is not a private event.

There is no elegant version. You do not quietly climb out, smooth your clothing, and rejoin the group as though you have simply made an unconventional sightseeing decision.

You become the event.

Adults appear. Children stare. Someone says your name in the tone adults use when deciding whether this situation requires a phone call. Your clothes are completely drenched. Your shoes make betrayal noises.

The field trip may continue, but you are no longer merely one of the students.

You are a cautionary tale with bangs.

Thankfully, Sister Dobson was there.

Sister Dobson was my preschool teacher—my church “Sister Dobson”—and, for one shining Fair Park field trip, the woman assigned to keep me from becoming a cautionary plaque beside the lagoon.

She pulled me out, which suggests that her in-home preschool curriculum included letters, numbers, snack time, and emergency lagoon retrieval.

Celeste also attended Sister Dobson’s preschool, although she was not with us that day. This means Sister Dobson gave our family a solid educational foundation and, in my case, possibly prevented my first published work from being an incident report.

The strangest part of the story is that Celeste remembers it.

Celeste does not remember huge sections of our childhood. I usually do - not every date or exact details, but enough to remember the people, the places, and how things felt. Which makes it especially funny that the story she preserved so clearly is the day I fell into the Fair Park lagoon.

She was not even there.

That is the part that gets me. She has no memory of entire shared eras of our lives, but she remembers my preschool water incident with the joy of someone who paid admission.

This is how family history works. The person who lived through an event retains a few blurry images and a lifelong distrust of decorative water. The person who missed it entirely becomes the archivist, court reporter, and hostile documentary narrator.

I can ask Celeste, “Remember that thing that happened at Grandma’s house?” and she will stare at me as though I have asked her to identify a minor cabinet official from the Carter administration.

But the time I fell into the Fair Park lagoon?

That story she has preserved in amber.

Not because she saw it. Not because she helped. Not because she was standing nearby with a towel, a concerned adult, or even the decency to be enrolled in the same field trip.

No. Apparently some family stories are powerful enough to travel without eyewitnesses.

Like folklore.

Or mildew.

And it is not as though I go around bringing up Celeste’s childhood humiliations.

For example, I do not regularly remind people about the time we were in Sack N Save and Mom was standing in the checkout line when she realized she had forgotten marshmallows. She sent Celeste and her friend to retrieve them.

Celeste came running back and got within approximately ten feet of the cart.

Then, for reasons still unknown to grocery science, she decided to throw the bag.

It hit the woman standing in front of Mom directly in the face.

A dramatic reenactment of the Sack N Save marshmallow incident.

Do I bring that up at family gatherings with a grin?

No.

I am a mature person.

I save it for writing.

That is the problem with family stories. They are not distributed fairly. Entire years disappear, while certain moments survive indefinitely because they involve public embarrassment, wet shoes, or an innocent shopper being struck by airborne marshmallows.

Somewhere along the line, my tiny, damp humiliation became part of the official family record, while enormous sections of our shared childhood were quietly deleted to make room.

Family memory does not work like a carefully labeled scrapbook. It works like a junk drawer. You may lose the baby pictures, the school names, and the emotional context, but somehow you still have a twist tie from 1987 and a complete oral history of the day Danielle fell into public water.

I doubt the incident appeared in any official Fair Park record. Newspapers tend to save their ink for larger disasters, not one preschooler briefly becoming part of the exhibit.

But family history does not require documentation. It only needs one drenched child, one delighted sister, and enough passing years for humiliation to become material.

So, for now, the historical record is simple:

Danielle went on a preschool field trip.

Fair Park had a lagoon.

The lagoon won.

But only because I was four.

I was small, damp, and working with limited data. I have since acquired better balance, stronger opinions, and a much healthier distrust of decorative water.

I am not saying I want revenge.

I am simply saying the lagoon should not get comfortable.

Fair Park in Dallas