Foolish Magic
When my daughter turned five during Covid, I worked to create a memorable virtual party. I hired the magician who had wowed her daycare. From an online store, I purchased black plastic magician hats, miniature tricks, and wands. From CVS, I bought jumbo bags of candy. It was almost Halloween, and who would trick-or-treat that year?
Across our long kitchen table, my daughter and I formed an assembly line. We grabbed fistfuls of candy—Snickers, Dum-Dums, Starbursts—stuffed each hat and sprinkled in tricks. Then we mapped a route across Los Angeles and contact-less delivered the favors to her dozen classmates before Saturday’s Zoom.
Gathering with her father at the kitchen table that morning, I was pleased. Not a natural host, I was certain the party would be joyous.
I logged onto Zoom and waited, and waited.
My gut chilled when the meeting didn’t start.
Then the texts arrived:
Is this the right link?
Do I have the wrong date?
What’s happening?!
Jabbing the keyboard, I cursed the magician/host who had yet to log on.
While my daughter squirmed, her father left him another irate voicemail. My sister snapped me from panic, sending a new link, which I quickly shared. For a painful hour, I sought to entertain the guests in the Zoom frames. I quipped about the magician’s “disappearing act.” I ordered her father to tell knock-knock jokes. The Interrupting Cow mooing over the asker only went so far. My sister and mother, at a kitchen table 3,000 miles away, bobbed like Muppets, eliciting laughs.
But soon the children began pulling at their faces. Some on beds, a parent angling the laptop, started turning somersaults. I relocated to the guest room so my daughter could do the same. Several parents signed off early, and all my daughter remembers is the no-show magician.
The next year, she was six, and we were living with my mother on the opposite coast. The change had been hard on her. With airline miles, I arranged a surprise weekend trip to Disney World. It had epitomized wonder since she’d seen it on YouTube: the gentle waking nudge, the sleepy strap into the car seat, the slurry, “Where are we going? School?”
“No, honey,” the answer came. “We’re going to Disney World.”
I booked a hotel with a theme-park shuttle bus. After packing I could hardly sleep, anticipating her excitement.
The magical morning, she lamented, “I’m not going to school?”
She hardly remembered the trick she’d envied for years. But as the shock wore off, thrill set in. We were going to Disney World after all.
At the hotel, we learned that the restaurant, gift shop, and vending machines had been closed since Covid. Apparently, the website hadn’t been updated since Covid. What was there—spied from our street-view room—was a strip mall across a six-lane highway. As if tailor-made, it had a CVS, pizza place, and souvenir shop.
In shorts and shades, we stood at the cement edge, holding hands. To our right, an ashen sidewalk stretched to streetlights. Only once we’d followed its path did we notice that the traffic signal heads were covered with black trash bags. There was no crosswalk, no button to press, just endless zooming cars. Heat-dizzy, we trudged to the left, but a quarter mile in, found no stoplights at all.
“Let’s go back,” my daughter begged.
But nothing was there.
Just then, like a mirage, a thin man with a backpack traipsed through the traffic. The vehicles yielded as if choreographed. He skipped past us, unharmed. All signs seemed to say, You cross, we stop, you’re safe.
“Come on,” I urged, grasping her hand.
She squeezed her eyes shut. I smiled and waved, my face a frantic plea. No one honked. Hoods lurched then retreated. As if I could atone, I angled my body to absorb any impact. As we leapt to the curb, she bleated Oh, oh, oh!
We stalled at CVS, selecting snacks, and at the pizza joint, sharing a pie, delaying the trip back. Then we rushed, forsaking the souvenir shop, desperate to re-cross before dark. Mouths agape—We’d actually done this?—we did it again and then clung to each other. At our room window, she gazed down at the headlight-lit highway.
Nothing that trip became more memorable. Not the newlyweds before us on the snaking “Under the Sea.” Not the families in matching t-shirts and Mickey ears. Not the waving, chipper dolls on the Small World ride. Only inside the store did she complain that I’d spring for the forty-dollar Minnie doll but wouldn’t buy her clothes. She never mentioned our squabble after, shaggy and heat-soaked, we’d boarded the wrong bus. I’ll never forget how, once seated on the right one, she tilted her cheek against my shoulder. Ask my daughter about Disney World, and she’ll exclaim, “We went on a six-lane highway!”
Our New York City trip when she was seven? At FAO Schwarz, I promised her one toy of her choosing. She bypassed the scrunched-faced Cabbage Patch dolls and lingered by the Build-a-Bear. I bit my tongue as she surveyed the Barbies; it seemed they could be anything but fat. On an upstairs balcony, we were suddenly captivated. A young man in a mime suit—striped black and white satin—somehow floated a flying saucer between his horizonal palms. Amazingly it spun, a silver disc with jeweled sides.
“Anyone can do this,” he assured the awe-struck crowd.
I peered at his hands, alert for a trick and seeing none.
“I want it,” my daughter whispered. “Please.”
Was it drone technology? Robotics? However it worked, the Zorbie seemed scientific, and it cost only twenty bucks.
How many hours did we squander in our hotel room trying to replicate the magic? The kit included putty one was to roll into a ball and tuck behind one’s ear. A thin string, a tangling wire, led from the ear putty to a glob atop the saucer. Practiced hands could twirl the string so it was invisible to the eye. We practiced, cramping our hands and chapping our fingers. We followed the instructions and YouTube tutorials. Ultimately, our determination devolved into frustration.
My daughter, who keeps everything, threw it in the trash.
“A scam!” she proclaimed, and that was that. Despite the restaurants and landmarks, our New York City trip became the we-got-scammed.
My attempts to deliver magic seem to nosedive. There’s always something in my blind spot. Admittedly, I began to pull back after her eighth birthday party, scrambling to shelter fifteen shrieking girls when a thunderstorm arrived during minigolf. But now I see my efforts have borne unintended fruit. As reductive as recollection can be, it pinpoints togetherness. It maps our lives in vibrant intersecting ways. Smooth successes can be happy yawns. But sideways flops? They are the stuff of giddy, glittering remember-whens.
Cover photo by Toni Reed on Unsplash
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