“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time,
in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t
realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of
chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve
years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I
saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too;
you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out
knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets
inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see
our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right
out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and
combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be
responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And
you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling
were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew
made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in
themselves.
After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t
really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing
and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that
dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then
they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries
up, and they’re left feeling a little heart sad and not knowing why. When
a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light
takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing
on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going,
you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of
instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.
That’s what I believe.
The
truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence
that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them
good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die.
People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one
reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes.
Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You
don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something
but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and
she calls you “sir.” It just happens.
These memories of who I was
and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who
I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic
if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember,
and I want to tell you.”
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