The first time I experienced magic was when I was about six years old. This was back in Mendota Heights Minnesota a suburb of Saint Paul. We lived on the corner of Decorah Lane in a one story rambler type house. This was a few years before my parents were divorced. I was trying to entertain myself as my parents would frequently enforce. I decided to practice my dribbling in the driveway. The year was around 1980, unchaperoned play in the neighborhood was encouraged rather than the current model of super vigilant supervision. We didn’t have a basketball hoop yet, and dribbling a basketball without the glory of making hoops was like fishing in an empty stream.
Across the street lived two young men who owned a basketball hoop. As I practiced my dribbling the hoop called to me, I wanted to sneak over and just shoot a couple of hoops, what could the harm be? Nobody was home, the driveway was empty and the hoop wasn’t doing anyone any favors left alone.
The history of these neighbors was not friendly. They had many late night parties and were known to stay up late into the evening drinking and being loud. My brother and I both considered using their hoop on previous occasions but agreed it wasn’t a safe place. We had that feeling of warning one gets similar to dark alleys, crossing busy highways, or drinking from pond water.
I finally was fed up with boring dribbling and decided I would risk it. I crossed the street and began practicing my lay ups. Being so young it was difficult to make baskets. My granny style was really my only hope for success. Wishing my brother was around to enjoy it with me, I continued by practicing a solo game of ‘horse’.
I continued throwing the ball up into the air and then it happened. It wasn’t particularly windy on this day and when I threw the ball up it literally stopped in mid-air without hitting the rim and the ball flew back over my head down the driveway. It was as if an invisible blocker reached their hand up and slammed the ball in the other direction. All the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I just stared up at the hoop trying to make sense of the nonsense. I looked at it blankly and a knowing just came over me - it was time to leave, I wasn’t welcome anymore. I chased after the ball rolling down the street. After I retrieved it I walked back up my driveway and just before I got to the house the two men pulled up. I’d already thought the experience was strange but when they got out of their pickup truck and went inside I knew that I was saved from some unknown or uncomfortable predicament. I didn’t tell anyone about it because I was rather in disbelief that it had actually happened, but it did happen and I would never forget it.
The next time magic revealed itself to me was a few years later. I loved playing baseball - shortstop was my position. It was a windy summer afternoon, certainly too windy for a random solo little white butterfly to be flying through. It was the nondescript kind of butterfly I would more likely see in a field of wildflowers. It was the strangest thing seeing this butterfly land in the short grass. As much as I was trying to focus on the game I had a certainty, a knowing that the next hit was going to land exactly where the butterfly landed. Sure enough, the batter hit the ball hard in my direction the ball bounced exactly where the butterfly had landed.
The idea of magic to me exists not in the vein of voodoo, or sorcery in the Merlin sense. For me, magic is an intense trust in one’s internal intuition. Magic is only magic because it comes from within rather than from without. Cultures and society teach us to only trust what we can see and understand. One’s intuition is not taught nor defined very well, and it cannot be described by any of the five senses. Science and technology cannot explain it, nor religion which struggles with the tangible. So, I guess magic lives in its own place, still being debated, denounced, argued and vilified.
Magic and deja vu go together. Both are feelings we receive from inside ourselves, subjectively described as memories, dreams, coincidence, serendipity, synchronicity, or the all too easy and one of my favorites - the chemistry in our brains miss-firing. All of these examples are true but none sing the song of certainty, belief, or a deep knowing that can explain these phenomena.
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