Magic Cards

There was not much on the walls, but it was an honest to goodness magic shop:  a place where hobbyists go to purchase the this and the that to make their miracles possible.

These places are getting harder and harder to find.  Used to be every town had a store where you could buy joy buzzers and fake dog poop and in the back you could find a small stretch of counter with card tricks, coin tricks and the ever-present cups and balls.  Larger towns even had whole stores just for magicians.  Not always on the beaten path, but they were listed in the Yellow Pages.

When I was a kid, my mom used to take me to Morrissey's.  It was in what looked like an apartment building, a half-flight up and a half-block away from a busy commercial street.  You could live your whole life on that block and never notice they were there.  And if you went in, it seemed like you could spend your whole life and never learn all of the secrets it held.

I am hopeless at magic, but I am a sucker for secrets.

My interest in magic began, as it did for many, with a man by the name of Marshall Brodien.  He appeared on our TV pitching something called TV Magic Cards and teased my curious self with the promise that "magic tricks are easy once you know the secret."

That was it:  I was hooked.  And like a junkie cat and his nip, I had to have them.  And for 4 decades I have been haunting shops and poking around online to find more and more secrets.

The secrets by themselves are generally disappointing.  After being roped in by the demonstrator and completely fooled like you were the least sophisticated civilian, you pay your money only to find that the magic is done with a bit of string and some wax.  These are the secrets that magicians are sworn never to reveal?  Seems like a lot smoke and mirrors.  (And wouldn't you be surprised how they use smoke and mirrors!)

And so it was that I found myself in Kamloops, in the heart of British Columbia, and inside  Cuz I'm Magic a brand new magic shop.  I was in town to visit my mom and she mentioned that the shop had just opened.  What could I do?  We had to go.

I wanted to support this new venture.  I wasn't going to be a huge customer, but I had to give him some money.  You can learn a lot about magic from books and videos and the internet, but it is only in performance that you can appreciate its real artistry.  It's when you can stand a couple of feet away from the demonstrator and have him fool you that you truly appreciate magic's power to capture and inspire.  Anyone can say Shakespeare's lines and call themselves an actor, but a magician's job is more complicated and more straightforward:  he has to convince you that something impossible has just actually happened.

My mom was great.  She played spectator while the proprietor demonstrated a couple of items and I looked around.  There was not a lot to choose from, but I did find a collection of Brodien's television tricks which included the TV Wonder Cards, the TV Mystery Cards and the TV Magic Cards.  Of course I already had these in various forms, but what made this set a must-have was the associated DVD with the original commercials.

The poor condition of the surviving video only served to enhance the value of the purchase as a time tunnel back to the very beginning of my passion for magic.  The decks will most likely never come out of their cases, but they have already served their purpose, already convinced me of the impossible by connecting me to my younger self.

Returning from the magic shop, I put my purchases down on a table that I used to know.  It came from the house I grew up in a long time ago and a long way away where it sat in a hall like it does now and where it received mail and keys and the contents of overflowing arms, much like it does now.

I had gone to Kamloops to see my mother because she will be 75 this year.  Hardly seems right.  Like the commercial for the magic cards, I think only of how she was when we all lived together so many years ago.

This was going to be the year that she and her husband celebrated their birthdays in Paris.  They both turn 75 this year and they had decided not to wait for their distractable kids and do something that they wanted to do.  Instead this was the year of the health scare, the near miss that made decisions necessary that were once so easily deferred.

Mom wanted to talk about those decisions that she had made.  She wanted to show me where things were and make certain I understood what she wanted.  I met Ed whom she has selected as her local guy, her point man to work with her kids who are scattered to three different countries.  We talked about lessons learned and not learned from affairs both ordered and disordered.

She talked about being the long distance daughter when it came to breaking up her own mother's house.  Some decisions were made deliberately and how some were made in haste and those memories are still fresh for her.

At one point, she pulled out a small creamer that came from her mother's house.  She remembered it from her childhood and it was the first thing that came to mind when she was asked to list what she might want.

I asked her about this little creamer and she said it was nothing special, it just reminded her of her childhood.  There was no family history connected with this little jug, just her personal history.  It was like her own deck of magic cards, her tunnel into the past.

These are unsettling conversations to have, illuminated as they are in the twilight between infinite and finite possibilities.  There are lots of cliches about growing older, lots of jokes, but only one truth.

I have tremendous respect for how my mom and my step-father are handling this moment in their lives.  They share many common interests and some common traits:  they're both very practical, very organized.  And it is this shared talent that is serving them best.  They are educating themselves, preparing themselves and their families and trying to make magic with the cards they have.

I used to think that, if I knew enough secrets, I could perform miracles.  As I get older, I am appreciating something I read once about magicians Penn & Teller.  They described themselves as "a couple of eccentric guys who have learned to do a few cool things."

And to that list of cool eccentrics, I would add Lois & Eric, a pair of real magicians.

Happy birthday to you both.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director