Magic of the Holidays.

My daughter was invited to an exclusive performance by a world renowned magician last week. She was thrilled and excited to attend.

When I pointed out that I had shown her magic tricks her entire life and she’d never seemed all that interested, she placed her right hand lightly on my left shoulder - “Yes, Dad… that’s because you’re not very good”. She is not wrong.

Much as merely adding a dimmer switch, unclogging a pipe, or installing a carburetor does not make one an electrician, plumber, or mechanic, my lifelong casual study of slight of hand can’t qualify me as a “magician”. I am a very proud amateur, and under no circumstance do I “perform” magic tricks for anyone, though I have been known to “show” someone a trick I’ve learned, from time to time - more as a curiosity than anything else.

The engineering which grounds magical illusion has always intrigued me, and the application of this engineering fascinates me even more. The relatively complex “Pepper’s Ghost” method of image display is well over 150 years old, yet is still used in modern stagecraft to fascinate audiences - the humble simplicity of paper playing cards matched with well-practiced skill can do the same.

See, that’s my problem. I’m not really fascinating .

I’m the reason my daughter loves magic, she just doesn’t love the magic that I do. Our friend is a master magician, her skills and performance transcendent; her goal is not to fool an audience, but inspire them - which she did last week, as in the days after her show, my daughter began at last to shuffle one of the random decks of cards that float about our apartment.

I couldn’t have been prouder if I was a good magician. I grew up watching magicians on TV: most wore tuxedoes or at least black vests, except for a man named Doug Henning, who seemed cast straight out of a renaissance fair - bushy black hair, bright colored t-shirts, flare jeans and a mustache rivaling Tom Selleck’s.

Though a stylistic outlier, Doug Henning mounted several hit shows on Broadway and television while developing illusions for live acts like Earth Wind and Fire and Michael Jackson. But my personal mentor was Mark Wilson, seen on many variety shows and the creator of a pre-fab collection of ready-to-learn illusions called the TV Magic Show Box, a gift which filled my home with wonder and various shapes of non-biodegradable plastic.

In an age before videotapes, I spread the road map sized instructional poster out on the living room table and tried my best to make my hands look like his hands. Once ready, I would first show the routine to our pekingese dog.

His name was Scooby Doo (I was not an altogether inventive child). He would patiently watch me until I said “Ta-Dah!”, hoping that something I was holding would mysteriously turn into bacon.

I’d show my mother next, who was kind, but blunt, “That was nice. I almost didn’t see how you did it.

Keep practicing.” The only other person I showed tricks to was my grandfather. He was a judge and a great intellect and a very nice man and there is zero chance that ever I fooled him, even once, but he would react to the spirit of the moment and say “ Hot Dog !” at the denouement.

Afterwards I would explain how I did it (or had tried to do it). That was the best part - he would copy the moves in order to understand the physics behind it.

He never performed these tricks, even for my grandmother. Yet it was my grandfather who pulled off one of the most magical performances I have ever witnessed.

For quite a few years, on Thanksgiving Day, my grandparents held a family dinner at their home, with my mother’s siblings and their families all attending for a shared afternoon and meal. My grandparents lived a block up the street from me, so I saw them all the time, but all my cousins were spread throughout the city and beyond, so it really was kind of an event to be all in the same place.

Of course these families grew, and the realities of late 1970’s rampant inflation made the practice of giving even a small Christmas gift to every other family member fiscally impossible. Like many families, we began to draw names from a hat at Thanksgiving.

But also like many families, small quarrels and feuds occurred during the year which made some folks less likely to want to buy a nice gift for a certain other folks. The first year was a bit of a disaster - gifts were laden with subtext of arguments begun deep in the summer months, resulting in gift cards and ashtrays for people who didn’t smoke.

So the next year (I think I was twelve) my grandfather called me in his office before any of the other families arrived. He had painstakingly solved the challenging gift-giving calculation, creating a matrix where no giver had an issue with the person they were to buy for.

He would be putting these names in a hat, and he wanted me to figure out a way he could pull out the right name at the right time. I won’t tell you how, but it worked.

He stood tall and authoritative and spoke in a clear and confident voice and seemed to just pull random names out of a hat. My more suspicious relatives, perhaps looking for an advantageous year-end revenge scenario, seemed disappointed at the results and demanded to see the slips of paper, which were plainly displayed.

And everyone got a nice gift that year. Except for me; I never beefed with anybody, but that meant nobody paid much attention to me either - I got a used board game, in a torn box with pieces missing and folded play money.

I didn’t mind, but my grandfather called me over as we left for home, shook my hand, and secretly, folded in his palm, passed me a ten dollar bill. Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe