Apropos of nothing, a few weeks ago the Very Excellent Boyfriend hopped up from his chair and said, “I’ll be right back”. He then disappeared down into the mystery that is his basement, leaving me puzzled. Normally I’d have been on his heels but I refuse to step foot down there, mostly because I’m afraid to discover that he has just as much stuff as I do squirreled away, and that if we ever decide to combine households it will not be pretty.
(I’m learning that this sort of willful ignorance has been keeping couples together since the dawn of time.)
He returned shortly, handing me a large, illustrated story book containing the entire Chronicles of Narnia. In response to my blank stare he said, “I remembered you said you didn’t read all of the Narnia books, and I thought you might like to remedy that.”
This is one of the many reasons he is excellent.
***
When I was a kid, The Magician’s Nephew was the sixth book in the series and indeed, I never read it. In this compilation the book is the first, as it is really a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s the VEB’s favorite of all the books, so I diligently set to reading it. I was immediately struck in the same way I’m always struck when reading good children’s literature – it always throws me back to that anything-is-possible place that lives inside us all, at least when we’re kids. Then the inevitable happens, and one day some kid on the bus breaks the news that all those magical things you believe in just aren’t true. You don’t know what to believe, but suddenly magical trees that get turned into magical wardrobes just don’t feel the same anymore. You wish for an owl to deliver a letter from Hogwarts to you, or for Peter Pan to show up on your windowsill, but now you know better.
I think we tend to come out on the other side of this in two ways. Some of us have kids, and perpetuate the magic through them, at least for a time. Others of us may or may not have kids, but either way we keep trying to find magic for ourselves long after we should. It’s elusive, mind you, but we have this sense that it’s right around the corner, just out of sight. We’re kind of obvious ourselves, though. We’re the ones who can sing “The Rainbow Connection” without irony, and who grab each other and dance around a bookstore when really terrible soft jazz is playing.
(Not that I’ve done either of those things lately. Nope. Not me.)
We might think about kissing one of these, just to see what might happen:
Mostly, though, we keep plugging away, trying to find magic in ordinary things. We might, for example, take a very sudden right turn to see a white egret fishing in a tiny harbor:
We might also drive over a washed out road and find a little bit of heaven, complete with a friendly (if non-human) tour guide:
And we might not be morning people, but we can be enticed by a sight like this:
Here on this summer solstice weekend, with not just a full moon but a SUPER moon, let’s all go find some magic.
