A Short Story Involving Magic

Yes, I have been absent for a long, long time, but it’s been busy in these parts, with lots going on.  I'm making new plans and I will rectify it all soon, but today I saw a little news item and it reminded me of this little short story…..

Once upon a time I was covering one of my very first events. 

A swanky four wheel drive kind of car company created an obstacle course on the top of a building in the lower west side of town, so semi-industrial, I am pretty sure it didn’t have a cutesy name yet. 

So, if you were one of the UES elite invited to the party, you had to navigate through a car showroom and then ride a cargo elevator to the rooftop. 

Then the guests had to wait an excruciatingly long time in an excruciatingly long line for quite possibly the stiffest free drinks ever poured on the island of Manhattan. 

Once they made their way to the bar, they would make their way over to the test drive area, crank up and fly over fake hills and giant puddles.*

It was a pretty beat event as those things go, celebrity-wise. There was an aging actress/model type who had once been ultra famous, with her much younger actor boyfriend.** I was working on a story about them and that was who I was there to interview. 

But there was also a middle-aged magic-type.  He was a “name” but also he showed up to everything. Every single event, ever.

And in the beginning, when I was pretty new to it all, I often got assigned the lower priority events,*** so he and I knew each other a little bit.  This was mainly because he would talk to me incessantly, clearly hoping to get some sort of quote in the magazine.

And on this particular evening, as I was waiting for my five minutes with the couple, he sidled up as he did.  And I gamely asked him a few questions, then waited for him to start telling me all about his next big trick. 

But on this night, he decided to take another tactic.  

He asked about me.  

And then started on that faux-deep sort of soul-searching sort of nonsense.  

He wanted to know if I believed in alternate planes.  Could there be things out there that ordinary humans did not understand?*****

After several long minutes of politely trying to deflect the conversation, he wasn’t letting me scoot past it at all.  

Pressing on, finally he said, “Just tell me, do you believe in magic? What would it take for me to make you believe?”

“Well,” I said, “I would absolutely believe in magic, if you could make a drink appear.”

He disappeared****** soon afterward. 

THE END

************************************************************************** 

*Yep, but that is not the point of my story.

**She was a cougar before it was hip. 

***It was excellent practice and fun, too. 

****Now, it’s not that I don’t believe in magic, that is also not the point of my story.  What I do not believe in are phony deep conversations that include equally phony soul-searching looks when I am in the middle of working at an event. Also, I did not want to insult his business or hurt his feelings.  He has been hugely successful at what he does, but do I believe that it is attributed to his connection with a higher plane or some special psychic talent? I just didn’t know. 

*****I am pretty sure that he did not count himself as the ordinary human variety.  This is someone who has made major, major giant things disappear. 

******Via his feet.

Mornings

From the beginning, Husband and I have had very different schedules.

Much like our personalities, his is much more regimented and mine is much more loosey-goosey.

When we first met, I was a journalist.

I spent half my time as a part-time reporter at a newspaper and the other half as a freelance reporter, which means that at any time I could be scooting off, then would go underground until the deadline was met. Then on to the next assignment or maybe a few days at the dog park training Lillie.* Or even an entire day at the movie theater watching three in a row.**

In any case, every week was different, but unless there was no way around it, I did my best to make sure I never had to be anywhere, dressed and ready before about 10am.

I am not a morning person.

Husband worked for a big company doing big company things on normal big company hours.

But there were several constants. Whenever we could, we'd always meet up in the evenings and every morning, unless I had been working overnight*** I'd pack breakfast for Husband.****

While the fanciness of it all has varied from time to time, it is always the same. Always a food. Always a little pack of vitamins and always a cartoon, not one that found somewhere, but a cartoon, starring us that I draw.*****

In the beginning these breakfasts were a little bit elaborate. I packed protein shakes in special plastic cooled mugs with straws so it wouldn't spill, with egg and cheese sandwiches and little cartons of orange juice. Then over the past year or so, it has settled into a menu: a toasted PB&J, a container of orange juice, a napkin and a cartoon.

But over the past few months, it's been sporadic at best. Occasionally when Elliot has had a late night, I sleep through it all. When I have been awake there have been times that I have sleptwalked to the coffee and that was the best I could do. And, worst of all, there has been more than one occasion when I have opened the bread and it's been moldy. Not a little bit moldy, but enough that I should be ashamed.******

So I resolved to resolve this.

And, for anyone who looks to the left side of the page you may have noticed that I follow my dear friend Anne's blog A Good American Wife. She writes and cooks and a few months or so ago,******* she posted a recipe for the Unstoppable Bacon Egg and Cheese Muffins.

When I read it, I thought, "This only has five ingredients. I can DO this." I even got a little fancy and switched out the bacon and scallions for sauteed ham and onions.

(If you are making the bigger muffins like I did, it takes it a bit longer to get brown on the top.)

And they were good. But I spent so much time watching them to make sure I didn't burn them that I lost track of time. So we had them for dinner, too.

Mmmmmm muffins. And there were still ones left for breakfast for the next few days.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*This did not go well.

**I LOVED these days. Wherever we go next has to be a town with a matinee movie showing. That was one of the hardest transitions when we moved here. No more afternoon movies.

***This happened occasionally, but even then sometimes I would stay up to visit for breakfast.

****Okay, for those who are counting, Husband was not technically Husband at that time. Sorry BigD, but I was 99% certain that he would be eventually, so hopefully that counts.

*****We have hundreds around. Some in a book from the first year we were together. Some in drawers around the house and always a few tucked in his wallet. Those are probably good luck.

******And I am.

*******Oh my gosh! Has it been this long ago?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I was thinking all day about what to write, wondering if I should say something about yesterday, but I couldn't. Even eight years later, it's a little too vivid to talk about it all. I can't even say the name that people use to refer to it...it just doesn't seem big enough. And more than that, if I feel this way from my own personal experience of being there and seeing and watching it all from my West Village vantage point, it's really too much to consider the people who were really really there. So not this year and maybe not next year either. I do think about every detail like it was yesterday.

5:30 am in Brooklyn

I've never been a good sleeper.  

Unless I am extra exhausted, I tend to be restless and wake up ultra early.  Up until just a few years ago, I would have really wild dreams in which my teeth fall out* while riding motorcycles and shooting guns. 

While I still get up early, the restlessness and crazy dreams have waned a bit, but as a general rule, being good at sleeping is not in my skill set.

When I lived in New York, when I would wake up early, often I would just get up.  

The sun would be barely rising, but when the choices were sit in my apartment with my thoughts and cleaning to be done or go out and see what the city was up to while I mulled, the choice was obvious.

The time in New York when the sun is rising is one of the few relatively quiet times in the city.  Sure there are some sounds, but the horns that were blaring at 4am, aren't now.  The giant motorcycles aren't pulsing down the street.  And no one is talking all that loud.  While there is always activity, it's really calm. 

Sometimes I would go running** on the West Side down to Battery Park. I would watch the boats on the water and scoot by the public art along the way (You have to know where to look, but it's there...a giant chess board, odd little statues and weird oblelisks staggered in the park.)

But my favorite was just to wander south, through Washington Square Park, down through Soho and into Chinatown.  I would pass by the club kids heading home and the allnight partyers making "the walk of shame."  

I know where the vendors keep their carts, locked up in an alley right off Houston Street.  When they gather to pick up their carts, and wheel them out, it's like an awesome parade that trails off into their own specific directions.  

Then on to my favorite---the fishmongers of Chinatown.  Seriously, perhaps it's creepy and strange, but I love to watch the process --- a whole fish, sliced and diced, lightening quick and put into its place on the cool ice.  (I feel the same way about meat stores as well.  It's just orderly, skilled and artful.) 

I would wander a while more and watch the city wake up.  Then I would head back home and get ready to move onto my own day.  

I think of it now, as I sit in my cousin's apartment in Brooklyn.  I've gotten up early, not only because I do, but because I am still on Norwegian time and in my head it's almost time for lunch.  The buildings are tall and shiny in the near distances and the sun is streaking the sky with reds and yellows and blues.

*Yes, I know this means a fear of growing up coupled with a desire for freedom, along with other general anxieties.  I'm over it now.  Thanks.

**Yes, yes, I did.

Read This

One of my favorite sites is Jezebel, which for anyone that pays attention to the sideline list will not find as a surprise.

It's the sister site to Gawker, which I rely on to keep me slightly informed about the media gossip in New York.

And I pay attention to Gawker mainly so I don't feel completely uncool and out of the loop, though I suspect I am becoming more and more uncool and out of the loop, which is becoming more and more okay with me.

Life changes, and quickly, but that is another post, for another time.

My point today is Jezebel has a feature in which they review books.

The books they choose are not books on any best seller list, at least not the best seller lists of today.

Jezebel reviews books that mattered when their readers were growing up: The Witch of Blackbird Pond or The Island of the Blue Dolphins...

And today it was From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

I learned to read at an oddly young age, an age which I will not share here because it's obnoxious to mention in conversation, but it was pretty lucky in any sense.

Lucky because Big D (who for those unfamiliar with this blog is my mother, so named because she is not. She is D for DaAnne, but small...) likes to have projects.

Also because from about age 3 until age 12, we lived on a farm in deep south Georgia in a town called Colquitt (not the county, but the town, for those geographically inclined.)

About 800 people lived there in the mid-80s. My family and I lived about 20 miles outside of the city proper on a dirt road off the Bainbridge Highway.

(If you are ever driving on that road towards Bainbridge, look to your right. You'll see a two story brick house in the middle of ring of pine trees surrounded on three sides by fields. That is the house. My dad built it for my mom in an attempt to make her happy so she would stay. It didn't work.)

At any given time, we could only get about three channels on the television and never at the same time. Some of our neighbors put up satellite dishes, but Big D thought they were tacky.

So on the hot hot summer days, and pretty much every other day, we read.

(There are huge chunks of pop culture I have only read about, never actually experienced, but again...another post, another time...)

I read constantly. I read the encyclopedia from A to Z one summer and "grown-up" books when I was done with the encyclopedia and my own stack from the library.

Now, I read magazines and books and the internet. And I ingest and store the information, but for some reason it's likely that I will stare at you blankly when you ask what I've been reading. I have a weird inability to just reel off a list of what has passed in front of my eyes, at least I can't do it on command.

I can, in fact, tell you about the books I read as a child.

The librarian at the Colquitt Library was the nicest woman in the world.

Her name was Miss Vera.

I don't know her last name, because as in the Southern way of nomenclature, we called everyone by their first name prefeced by a Miss or a Mister, no matter that she wore a wedding ring and I thought she was the second oldest person I had ever seen.

(The first was a great great aunt who lived in an old falling down house. And when she died, her children found thousands and thousands of dollars stuffed into the mattress and underneath the floor boards and in drawers. No kidding. She didn't trust banks and she was so wrinkled that she looked like a dried piece of fruit. I mean this kindly. She was also a nice lady who made quilts. But that was the oldest person I had ever seen when I was that young.)

Miss Vera, who was probably in her 60s, must have had scoliosis because she was hunched over almost double, which made her just about the height of me.

I'm not tall now, so I was even less so when I was not-quite-double-digits.

Big D would take me the library at least once a week and I would peruse the stacks. And no matter what I chose, Miss Vera would have put aside a book or two for me as well.

I read The Great Gilly Hopkins about a tough girl who was tough because she needed to be to survive.

I read The Cricket of Times Square about a little guy who was a little bit lost.

I read Bridge to Terabithia about best friends and imaginary worlds.

I read A Taste of Blackberries about loss.

And I read From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler about a girl who didn't want to be ordinary and ran away with her brother to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

About eight years ago, I was walking on the Upper West Side with a friend of mine.

It was a sunny Saturday. We had just had brunch and were wandering around a bit.

He was going to meet a friend to watch a hockey game and I had to go to work.

We passed by what would have been called a yard sale if it we were in the suburbs. But, because we were in New York City, it was a stoop sale being run by a teenager with slightly smeary eyes, as if she couldn't get off all of her makeup from the night before.

I have a certain need to support kids in their business ventures. I stop and buy over-priced, poorly sugared lemonade and I always purchase things I do not need at any sort of money raising venture run by an industrious kid.

So we paused while I flipped through the book section.

And there it was, a copy of "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler."

I was torn.

Should I tell this too-cool-for-school Manhattan teen that she was making a big mistake?

Should I tell her "Trust me. Do not sell this book."

And further, "If you are going to sell this book, do not sell it to me for just one dollar. I promise you, I will pay more. I will be happy to fund at least one over-priced drink...one that you should not be able to buy at a place you are not old enough to pass through the doors of at your young age."

And more than that, "This book matters. One day when you are possibly not living in Manhattan, you will see it and it will remind you that Claudia Kincaid longed for, and intended to have, a life not ordinary."

I did none of that. I bought the book. And raved about it for blocks until my friend and I parted ways.

That book is somewhere here.

When we were figuring out what had to go into storage back in the States and what would come with us to Norway, I had to cull through my piles of books.

And "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" made the cut.

So somewhere in the piles of books I have not sorted through, but intend to, so we can finally have a party, is my copy I bought from some unsuspecting teen on the Upper West Side of New York City.

I'm going to find it soon.

Then I will reread it and maybe even write a thank you note to E.L. Konigsburg. I will thank her for telling me early on that it's okay to aspire to to a life that is just a little bit different.

And also, for giving me the idea that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a fine place to run away to.