magic

Many years ago, when Isaac was about 4 years old, we visited my brother, Kirby. As well as being the quintessential teller of tall tales, Kirby is somewhat of a magician, specializing in card tricks. Naturally, my children, fascinated by his skills, gathered around to see his latest trick which used two decks of cards, a magic deck and an imaginary deck. The trick was that, as a member of the audience did something to the imaginary deck, the exact same thing would happen to the magic deck. Kirby demonstrated several times until the children were appropriately and totally amazed! Kirby was delighted with their reverence and awe and as a gesture of good will gave the magic deck to one of the older children (later teaching him how to do the trick himself) and gave the imaginary deck to Isaac. Isaac was beside himself with excitement and slipped it into the pocket of his shorts for safe keeping. It was promptly forgotten, or so I thought.

A few months later and back at home, I was folding laundry one day and Isaac came looking for a pair of shorts, putting on the very pair he was wearing that day at Kirby’s. He stuck his hands in the pockets, then a look of shock and dismay came over his face. I watched, puzzled, as he pulled out his hand, stared at the open, “empty” palm and said, “Oh no! I still have Uncle Kirby’s invisible cards!” My delight at his “discovery” had to be kept in check for the moment as we discussed the what-to-do of the situation. Not only had we kept them longer than was polite, they had been through the wash, probably more than once! We examined them carefully, but, having quite limited experience with “invisible” things, we couldn’t really tell if there had been any damage, or how severe it was (for all we knew, they were rendered impotent). We decided the appropriate thing to do would be to send them back to Uncle Kirby. We composed the perfect letter of apology, explaining the whole situation and expressing our profound feelings of regret that we may have ruined them. We enclosed it in an envelope with the cards and mailed it off that very day.

Weren’t we relieved to find out that the cards weren’t ruined at all, and Uncle Kirby was so great about it he just laughed and laughed… and laughed.