Magic

What little magic remains in the world exists as tiny fragments and has hardly any effect, like a few flakes of sea salt scattered across a big lake. As a child, you might toil for years and only collect a thimble full. Once you’re an adult, the scales covering your eyes make it virtually impossible to see magic anymore. If you’re lucky, whatever you found as a child dissolved into your brain as fond memories.

For a few years I spent part of every summer vacation walking along the abandoned tracks of the Rock Island line that skirted the edge of my grandfather’s property in Oklahoma, looking for glass insulators that had fallen from the rotting telegraph poles. It was hot work, and when I think back on it (those scales of adulthood) I wonder why I didn’t encounter any rattlesnakes. But eventually I collected two grocery sacks full of insulators, each containing a speck of magic. Having magic and doing something with it are two different things. I stored most of them in a bedroom closet. Eventually the sacks disappeared. I don’t know what happened to them, though my mother is a prime suspect.

There was magic in the water cistern under my grandfather’s house. You could taste it, and it has somehow preserved that house, still visible on satellite photos even though it was abandoned fifty years ago. The barn on the other hand, which had been a landmark for Rock Island engineers, is now just a pile of boards.

Petrichor, the smell after a spring rain, that’s magic you’re smelling. Scientists say it comes from soil bacteria (what do they know?) and call it a sesquiterpenoid, which only proves my point, as those kinds of words must be part of a magical incantation.

There was a bit of evanescent magic in firework stands and their wares, at least when I was a kid. The gaudy paper wrappings and mysteriously translated Chinese lettering (chrysanthemum with report) suggested a bridge between the magical world and ours. We bought bottle rockets and buzz bombs, and my dad splurged on roman candles and a few fountains. Then we waited impatiently for the sky to be dark enough to begin our world class spectacle. Buzz bombs were my favorite. Their short thick fuses suggested they were serious business: lighting one was an act of bravery. We ran for safety, then turned around just in time to see them fly skyward in a one second tight spiral of sparks. The darkness and my sudden night blindness meant I could only imagine what happened to them next. Perhaps, their magic spent, they returned to the world from whence they came.

One year I spent several of my own dollars on a tube that was covered in pictures of blooming fireworks. It promised to be a proper finale for our evening. Once everything else had burned out, I set it carefully at show center, envisioning we were moments away from a glory of truly pro-grade bursting effects high overhead. I lit the fuse and ran like hell. There was that moment of silence when the fuse disappeared into the tube, that clench of fear that it might be a dud, and then POOFPOP, barely thirty feet in the air. Red six-petaled weed would have been an accurate translation. I was greatly disappointed.

The next day, though, I went hunting for buzz bomb carcasses in the pasture, wondering if there might still be a hint of magic left in them. I found a couple. They were nothing but scorched cardboard tubes, minus their plastic propeller, with all hint of colorful wrapping having been incinerated in their brief flight. It was more a curiosity than a disappointment, though. What magic had been in them was now melted into my brain, and that was good enough. Magic, if you are lucky enough to find it, should be spent and not hoarded.