SNAPSHOT: Silhouette

Mister Wizard

One Sunday night when I was twelve my uncle showed me a card trick that changed my life.

Fanning the deck out on the kitchen table he instructed me to pick out one card and turn it face up so that everyone in the room could see it. To this day I still remember that card: The 5 of Clubs.

Then my uncle did something completely unexpected. He picked up the telephone and dialed a number and asked to speak to Mr. Wizard. After a moment he handed me the the phone.

"Ask the Wizard what card you picked," Uncle Tony instructed.

If I'd been a little older at the time and already cynical, I would have no doubt suspected that my uncle---a notorious funster and practical joker---had prepared a suitably elaborate stunt of which I was to serve as the butt-end, and so thinking I would have naturally adopted a bored and disinterested tone of voice that so that later I could claim I'd never really been 'taken in'. But in those days kids of twelve were still young enough to be credelous and naive and open to magic, and I can even now recall a tingle of anticipation as I took up the phone and innocently inquired,

"What card did I pick, Mr. Wizard?"

A lugubrious voice answered, "5 of Clubs," then disconnected.

I was flabbergasted. How could such a thing be possible?

"Once you know how a trick is done," my uncle cautioned me, "it's magic is all gone."

But after much pleading and cajoling and outright begging on my part, my uncle finally agreed that if I came to his house the following Thursday night he'd reveal Mr. Wizard's secret to me. While I waited impatiently for Thursday to roll around, I ran the trick over and over in my head, and even before my uncle's revelation I pretty much figured out how it was worked: it was based on a simple word code, and those so inclined can look it up in a dozen magic books. After a half-hour's practice with my uncle I was confident enough to go out and perform the trick for my friends, who were all equally as astounded as I was. And in this way I was set off on a mission that would obsess me all that summer.

I went down to the Grand Book Center where they sold used paperbacks for ten or fifteen cents and bought up every book on card magic I could find. Then I raided the shelves of the public library and came home with another armful. I taught myself dozens of basic mathematical formula tricks, but not content with these, I spent hours working in front of the bathroom mirror until I could (with tolerable proficiency) palm a card, create a break in the deck, perform a double and triple lift, shuffle without and shuffling and deal off the bottom of the pack. Contrary to my uncle's warning, the more I learned the more I wanted to learn, the more magical it all seemed. I had no interest in card games at all, but was never without a deck of cards. I read biographies of Houdini, Dunninger, and Carter the Great. Before long I had amassed a small personal library that spilled over onto the floor of the room I had the misfortune of sharing with my older brother.

"How many of those stupid books do you need?" Jack sneered.

One trick I would have loved to pull off would have been to make my brother disappear---permanently. But that wasn't in any of the books I read. So instead I kept my focus on magic and eventually I put together a small repertoire of tricks with which I astounded (maybe bored) anyone I could corral for ten minutes at a time. With practice, I became bolder.

It happened that there was a girl in our neighborhood named Roseanne Kessler, a cherubic-faced early-developer who seemed to fill out her blouses long before any of the other girls did. Just being in her presence caused me to feel thick and clumsy and tight inside. As I was completely lacking in all social and romantic skills, I decided to woo her with my most elaborate and (so I thought) astounding effect.

"Pick a card," I instructed her, "and turn it face up." The King of Diamonds.

Then I had her insert the card back in the deck, shuffle and re-shuffle to her heart's content, then fan the cards out on the stoop again only to find her her card had mysteriously gone missing from the pack.

Then the Coup-de-Grace: from behind my back I produced a hardboiled egg and instructed her to roll it back and forth on the stoop. When the shell fell away the words "King of Diamonds" were clear and legible (in black ink) on the surface of the egg.

It had taken several hours to set up the trick, and for my thanks I received a blank stare, followed by the only two words Roseanne Kessler ever spoke to me: "You're weird."

But notwithstanding Roseanne and my brother, my magical summer continued apace. Toward the beginning of September a movie house in Manhattan began showing a revival of "Houdini" starring Tony Curtis, Every day for a week I took the subway from Brooklyn and sat each time through two showings. Never had I been so mesmerized by a movie in my life. By the end, when Houdini's Upside Down Water Torture Tank trick goes horribly awry and he expires onstage after promising his wife Bess that, "If there's a way...I'll be back," I was awash in tears. I felt the movie was speaking directly to me. And there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that I would someday join the ranks of the legendary stage magicians.

Of course, I never did. In fact, by the following summer I had almost completely lost all interest in my tricks. I'm not sure I can say exactly why. Except that the next year I was thirteen, and the year after that fourteen, and as usually happens with boys entering into adolescence, my attention wandered to other things. I lost my focus and eventually magic drifted out of my life for good.

Nowadays my fingers are thick, my timing is shot, and I wouldn't dare to try even the simplest effect. So it goes: we have it, and we throw it away.

And yet, in later years, on the most boring, rotten, paper-thin days of my life, I might riffle through a deck of cards just to be doing something, and if I should happen to light upon the 5 of Clubs I get a sudden surge of joy and enthusiasm. I may not know what to do with it anymore, but I know exactly what it is. Childhood summers are like that, they best ones anyway. You carry them around with you all your life, even if you only stumble on them in the dark once every few years or so.

Thank you, Mr. Wizard. Thank you, Uncle Tony.

SNAPSHOT: Leaf After Rain

In Their Own Words:

"For Shaftesbury, Burke, Kant, Schiller, and their followers,
{B}eauty was the path back to the world that they were losing in losing the Christian God -- the world of meaning, order, and transcendence, which we must be constantly emulating in this world if our lives are to be truly human and truly meaningful."
---Roger Scruton

STORY: The Lives of the Dead (500 word Challange)

The 500 word challange is just that: create a complete short story in 500 words; this is not exactly my specialty, but I've given it a shot. How well or poorly I've done the reader can decide.


The Lives of the Dead

I go down to the place where I know she’ll be waiting, on the street where Turtle Park used to stand before they tore it up. I find her pacing the small edge of sidewalk as if the trees and the grass and the swings have remained intact all these years.

“Have you seen my babies?” she asks.
“Not yet,” I tell her.
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“I’m sure they’re fine,” I lie. “Anyway, the police are looking for them now.”
She nods and begins pacing the sidewalk again. After a while she turns back to me and speaks.

“Have you seen my babies?”

The first time this conversation occurred I was a boy and had no idea what to make of it. I told only my grandfather, Vincenzo Tresca; he told me I had a gift he called “the sight”. Now many years have passed and I return to this place over and over and the words are always the same:

“Have you seen my babies?”
“Not yet.”

This is what it means to be dead:

Imagine your life as a giant reel of film unspooling for many thousands of feet. Now imagine a three minute segment clipped from somewhere in the middle of that reel and looped so that it plays over and over again long after the rest of the film has disintegrated. This is all that was left of a young mother: the dread and anxiety of hopeless waiting.

As a teenager, I read the particulars: her two little girls never made it home from the park alive. After the funerals, the young mother, broken by her grief, swallowed a nearly full bottle of Seconal. In all these years, my only wish is to see her at peace.

“Have you seen my babies?”
“Listen,” I tell her. “I don’t have much time. Your daughters are gone. They are at peace. There is nothing more you can do for them now.”
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“They aren’t coming home. Their home is no longer in this world. Neither is yours. You must let go.”
“Have you seen my babies?” she asks.
I keep at it, knowing it will never do any good. She hears me, she must understand, but nothing will ever change.
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
It’s almost light now, I give it my last try:
“I never married,” I tell her. “I have no children. I have left no one behind.”
“Have you seen my babies?”
“For over eighty years, since I was a boy, I have loved no one but you. Now it’s my time to rest as well. Only you bind me here. I want to rest only with you.”
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“Please”---
This is what it means to be dead. This is all I have left.

I go down to the place where I know she’ll be waiting…

Jane Saw it Coming

Though she could have no way of knowing it, Jane Austen offered, in Pride and Prejudice, a pungent criticism of modern middle-class American life.

Reading the novel today, one is struck by how modern and familiar the character of Lydia, youngest of the Bennett sisters, seems. We know this girl. She lives in our neighborhood, down our street, even---God help us!---in our own home!

She is the American teenager in the year 2010. Or any other recent year.

Put another way, Lydia is almost an amalgam of the worst aspects of modern-day American adolesence---female variety. (The boys are just as bad, but they are another story).

It is easy to see what makes Lydia so familiar to us today. There is her boldness and flirtatiousness, her obession with boys and trivial gossip, her bursting-out sexuality. Of course she is the perfect product of an unconstrained consumer culture ("I bought my bonnet...only for the fun of having another bandbox"). And there is her general ignorance and, above all, the utter vacuousness of her personality. For all these reasons, Lydia seems the one character who would feel most at home in modern day America. She has friends here. If you could somehow propel her forward in time two-hundred years to any middle-class suburb in America, I'm sure that, allowing for some adjustment to modern technology (cell phones, Facebook), she would fit in very nicely with her mall-hopping sisters of the 21st Century.

Now anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows that Elizabeth Bennett, the novel's heroine (and Austen stand-in) almost violently disapproves (disapprobates?) of her youngest sister. Attempting to convince her father to intervene and forbid Lydia from accepting a friend's invitation to follow the regiment to Brighton, Elizabeth describes her erstwhile sibling as "a flirt in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation, without any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person", and further laments the 'ignorance and empitiness of her mind"

As it happens, of course, Elizabeth is proven right with regard to her errant sister. Lydia elopes with the scoundrel Wickham. Retruning home with her new husband, Lydia creuelly gloats to her eldest sister Jane that she has usurped her rightful place as the first sister to marry---ignorant, of course, of the fact that Wickham had to be bribed into marrying her and that only through the efforts (and financial help) of Darcy is she saved from the tragic fate of a 'fallen' woman.

On second thought, I don't know if 'tragic' is the appropriate term here. I am not sure that anything that happens to Lydia can be considered 'tragic' except in the most general sense of the word. Her life may indeed turn out to be lousy, but in literature 'tragedy' requires a certain degree of self-awareness, and Lydia is certainly one of the stupidest characters in all of fiction. She lacks the depth of understanding and feeling needed to experiece real tragedy.

One thing we can conclude from all of this is that Jane Austen surely did not like silly, frivolous women. What is interestng to consider here is that Austen is often proclaimed to have been 'ahead' of her time', meaning by this that she was one of 'us' and not one of 'them'---'them' being the closed-minded, unliberated British gentry of the 18th Century. But somehow, I don't think that our modern world and lifestyle would have suited Jane Austen at all.

In Their Own Words:

"It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?"

Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry".