Magic Lessons: part 1

            I was ten years old when my father started giving me magic lessons. He was a devout Irish-Catholic who insisted that I was comfortable with God and had shared in my first communion before I learned anything that might make me question Him. I was seven when he sat me down after Mass and told me that magic existed and eight when he demonstrated his own skill in the art. But it wasn’t until my tenth birthday that the teachings began.

            “Science, my dear Matthew, is a matter of facts. Magic, however,” he said with his eye twinkling the way it only did when he had a secret, “is a matter of ideas.” He pulled two bags from his pocket: an empty Skittles container and a sandwich baggie filled with small pebbles. He emptied the pebbles into the Skittles bag plainly and then called my brother Daniel in. My father shook the bag for Daniel so that the contents clearly rattled. Daniel held his hand out, his four-year-old eyes widening with excitement, politely saying “pease” as he had been taught. Without the gaudy flourish you might expect from a stage magician, my father poured brightly colored candy into my brother’s hand.

            My father hated stage magicians, or the “bloody attention-seeking liars” as he called them, for the perversion of his sacred art. To him, the performers who called themselves magicians rarely were. Most of them used smoke, mirrors and sleight-of-hand. And the few who did use real magic made it even more of a production by “speaking against our Lord and Savior with all their witch talk and devil worshiping.” He believed that if you were going to use mysticism to make a profit (which he wasn’t too fond of overall) at the very least don’t draw attention to it. He constantly praised the works of Disney and Henson for their subtle magic doubling as entertainment (and it helped that they were good Irish boys, even if Henson was a hippie).

            I was given a week to imitate the candy switch. It took me a month. It didn’t have to be pebbles into Skittles necessarily, but I needed to somehow take an ordinary object and give my brother candy. I tried bouncy balls into gumballs, coins into sweet-tarts, and even my father’s cigarettes into candy cigarettes (lost TV privileges for a week after that one). It didn’t help that all I had to work with was “magic is a matter of ideas.” My father wouldn’t teach me any more until I accomplished the goal, despite my whining that I needed more lessons first. “You don’t need more lessons, you want more lessons,” he curtly explained, tired of my constant protests. “You have everything you need to accomplish this task.” I finally earned my second lesson when I took a scoop of mud and gave Daniel a chocolate bar.

            That following Sunday, I excitedly explained to my father how I had shaped the mud into a bar, wrapped it in foil, and left it where Daniel could find it. He smiled proudly but had that twinkle in his eye. “And how did you change the mud into chocolate?” I was perplexed at his question. I had just explained the whole story. What else was I supposed to say? The longer he stared at me, the more his proud smile started to look smug. “Every effect comes from a cause, Matthew, even in magic. We don’t always understand it, but even magic has a process. You used a tool to make that chocolate. What was it?” I studied his face trying to find some hint as to what the answer was. After several minutes I blindly guessed “Daniel?” He nodded, seemingly impressed.

            My father explained the magical process using baking as an analogy. “Think of how your mother bakes a cake. She has four basic necessities she uses to make a cake: ingredients, utensils, tools, and energy. The ingredients are raw materials that are unimportant on their own. It could be anything, rocks, toys, even thin air. Your mother uses cake mix and eggs; you used mud. Utensils are used to prepare the ingredients. A whisk beats batter while aluminum foil looks like a chocolate wrapper. That leaves the tool and the energy. The tool shapes the ingredients while the energy causes the actual change. Your mother puts her batter in a pan in the hot oven. Now, we know that Daniel was the tool that shaped your ingredients, but where did the energy come from?” It had become obvious to me that most of my father’s questions were best answered by first instincts. “From me,” I said hopefully. “Yes, Matthew,” my father whispered as he moved in close, “and that is something you must remember; magic cannot be done by one person. One person can do a lot, but you need more to do something magical.”

            We exhausted Daniel as a tool pretty quickly. If we wanted to produce more than candy, we were going to need more than a four-year-old. About five months after the first lesson, we started staying after Mass for coffee and donuts which we never did before (“the Lord’s day is not meant for finagling a free breakfast.”) But we needed more mature marks, not to mention multiple subjects for my training. “Now the trick to mystifying adults,” he explained as he put a tie on me before church, “is to never to tell them a lie. That might work on children, but adults are more likely to trust their assumptions than anything they might be told. Do you understand?” It was a simple concept, but I was still confused. “I understand that, but… is this going to make God mad? Doing magic in a church, I mean. I can’t imagine He’d like us working against Him in His own house.” My father chuckled as he smoothed out my shirt and wiped some dirt of my face. “’Working against Him?’ Where do you think we get our ability to begin with?”

            My mother wasn’t too fond of my magic lessons. She had no ability herself, but she did respect the art. What she didn’t like was that I was being taught how to trick and lie. I remember when I eavesdropped on my father assuring her magic lessons were important. “You knew our kids would have these talents, Marie. I have to make sure he knows how to do this properly.” “But through tricks and lies, Sean? Matthew’s an innocent boy. That means he’s corruptible. Teach him to lie for a reward, and who knows how it’ll affect him.” I heard what sounded like a kiss and then my father’s voice in a gentler tone saying, “That’s why I’m teaching him my way, instead of my parents’.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I trusted my father too much to ever question him.

After that my mother helped out with my lessons in her own way. While my father taught the “math and science” of magic, my mother taught the “arts and literature.” Which I found out meant, to my pleasure, watching old TV shows to see magic in action. We’d watch Muppets and Disney of course, but I learned so much more from Lucy.

I was the only ten year old who knew every episode of  “I Love Lucy.” My mother explained that “talking animals and goofy monsters are impressive, Matty, but that’s for children. You want intelligent enchantment, just watch Lucy.” Every night, my mother would feed us kids, bathe us, put us in pajamas, and turn on Nick at Night. My father even approved of this (again, it helps Lucy was an Irish girl.) Every episode, Lucy would drag Ethel into some crazy plot or situation that would always end OK, if not pleasantly. There was nothing “magical” about them, but these were impossible situations and Lucy had us believing them every night.

By my eleventh birthday, I had pretty much mastered switches: mud into chocolate, the Canaan wedding wine pour (juice only until I got older), paper into dollar bills (immediately put in the church donation box), and anything else I could get someone else to think of. Despite all of the possibilities that switching offered, I still had plenty to learn. My father had mentioned conjuring, vanishing, teleporting, and more complicated magic styles. As hard as the first year was, my father told me it’d take another ten to fifteen years to finish my training.