Slight of hand.
The other night I went out to dinner with my friend, Deb. After dinner had planned to go to the mall and sucker punch teenagers in love, but we ran out of time. I went to the rink to see if I could find a way to get next Monday off so I could take Alyx to a book signing in San Francisco.
While I was there I saw some of the kids hanging out with this guy I didn’t recognize. I went over and he was rolling around a few coins in his hands. He did the coin behind the ear trick and the kids thought that was amazing. He saw me and asked me to hold out my hand. When I did, he placed two coins in my hand. One just a silver dollar and another bronze looking coin I had never seen before. He asked me to put my hands behind my back and then take one coin and put it the hand that didn’t already have a coin in it. I did it and I could feel something was different.
He then brought my hands out in front of me and I struggled with the fact that now that the coins were in two different hands, they didn’t feel the same. They felt smaller. He asked me to open my hands and when I looked down I was shocked to see that the two coins he placed in my hand were not what I now held in my hands now. It was just two plain quarters.
He must get a rush from the expressions he gets from people and if that is true, he got an overdose from me when I looked up at him in complete shock.
He said there are three people in the world when it comes to magic. The people that think it is ‘cute’, the people that feel like they already know how he did it and the people like me. People who know it’s just a trick, but for a small time, want to believe it was magic.
I get how people could hate magic. You’re being tricked over and over and made to look foolish. For me though, I guess I have been tricked many times in my life and feel foolish most of the time anyway. I want to believe it’s magic if only for a little while. For a time I want to believe that someone can take something from nothing or change one thing into another and make something beautiful and out of something ordinary. I would say, “HOW DID YOU DO THAT!?” and in the same breath tell him not to tell me. I didn’t want to know. I’m a smart girl and I would figure it out soon enough and then all I would be left with is just being impressed that he did it so convincingly.
I’m not ready to believe that it’s all just smoke and mirrors.