Magic. Why do I call these stories magic stories? Well. Because all the stories involve magic in one form or another. Now you’ll want to know how many forms there are. Oh, lots. Plain old magic—black and white. Black with bad intentions, white with good. Voodoo. Witchcraft.. Prayer. It’s all the same. It all taps into an area of knowledge that has nothing to do either with the intellect, or with what appears to be sensible. That’s what I think, anyway. I don’t know or do much magic, but what little I do know I mostly learned from a blind social worker named Myrtle Clara Coplen. She taught me, for example, to throw the magic circle—well, it can be any shape really, just so it surrounds the person you are trying to keep safe. My personal magic circle looks like a doughnut, or a fat, sparkly hula hoop. Myrt’s was like a big egg. Myrt taught my daughter Megan, big-time learning-disabled, to read when she was fourteen. Megan was headed straight for jail or the bin at that time, and now she is an architect with her own firm in London. Surely that’s a kind of magic too. I think so. Myrt wouldn’t let me watch the reading lessons.
One day Megan said to me when she was a little kid: Isn’t it amazing? I just let my bike lay on the lawn and nobody ever steals it. That’s because I put the magic circle around it, Megan, I said. I don’t believe in that kind of crap, said Megan. Okay, I’ll take the circle off, I said. And twenty minutes later the bike was stolen. Megan still half-way believes that Mum—that’s British for Mom, you know, Megan is now more of a Brit than she is an American—anyway, she still sort of believes that Mum can do magic. Put a magic circle around me, Mum, she’ll say when she’s going into an exceptionally difficult presentation. So I do—when I remember. What the hell, it certainly can’t hurt, can it? And maybe—just maybe—it can do good.
Open your eyes. Look around you. Believe. There’s magic everywhere. Once a numerologist said to me: First you believe and then the miracles start to happen.... I don’t know, it seems to me that life is just more fun when you believe. Right at this very moment, I have a beautiful silver and stone talisman buried in my front yard; I’ll dig it up at full moon—today—after Mother Earth has cleansed it of all the anger that was in it. Then I’ll let it lie on top of the earth overnight in the full moon, and then for a day in the sun. Be sure you mark the spot, said Teesie, who helped me to do this. I’ve spent hours digging to find something I’ve buried. Teesie said. See? More fun. I mean, what are you doing at this very moment that’s this much fun?
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