The Memory of Magic

While at the zoo with her Grandpa, my granddaughter Addison had her face painted! I think it makes her look like a mysterious princess or little fairy spirit... both of which she can certainly be!

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 heartsad 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.
          ~Robert. R. McCammon, Boy's Life

     Recently, my 4 year old grand daughter Addison spent the night here with us. There is nothing quite like a 4 year old in the house to spark things up-- not only were Lanny and I more alert and paying attention to things that usually don't impress us, but the dog was too. He would snooze on the floor with his ears cocked, trying to relax but always on high alert.

     Addison has entered the wonderful world of make believe, where children can conjure up wonderful stories in their heads and act them out without feeling silly or self-conscious. She entreats me to enter her world to play, and I try... I really try. But the blocks on the floor she has carefully placed into a big square look all disjointed and loose to me. She sees the house her imaginary princess lives in-- I see a collection of blocks that needs to be stacked into high walls and a roof put on before it can be a proper "house". Addison can totally live in the world of make believe-- I can only visit it now and then, and always need her help. But I love visiting it with her-- it helps remind me of my own childhood and those wonderful days of innocence. And if I try hard enough, I can shed some of my own self-consciousness and start to see that princess!

     And that is the joy of being a grandparent, I think. It allows us to reconnect with our own long-past childhood and remember for a moment what it felt like to be so innocent and joyful. As a parent, I used to play with my boys sometimes. But I was usually too busy being Mom-- and all the adult things that go with that role. There wasn't much time for play. As a retired Grandma I have nothing but time when I am with my grandkids, and that has reopened the world of play -- the "memory of magic". I like it!

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows. 

          ~John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells

A bouquet of flowers picked from the yard and presented with grand flourish to Grandma...