Tricks are for Kids
by Franklin Crawford
My father was magical from the time I could walk and talk until I could almost print my name. He stopped being magical when he showed me, Doc and Johnny, the Jack n’ Jill game. The performance had stumped me up to that day of disillusionment.
On the steps outside his shop Dad wetted two small pieces of tissue paper with his tongue and placed them delicately on the fingernails of his left and right index fingers. Dad’s index and middle fingers were close to even lengthwise. I don’t know if this served him well as a carpenter, but the were a plus for the Jack n’ Jill stunt.
“This is an old little story from long long ago and no one knows how it came to be …”
Dad said, placing his hands palms down with only the papered fingernails showing.
He was scary-big but spoke in a disarming singsong voice:
“It’s a story about a couple of birds
that can fly so high they disappear in
the big blue sky. Behind your ears–is
that where they go? Maybe aback of
your head where you have no eyes?
No one knows. No one knows where
they go when they go
they just fly away fly.”
We stared at the hands and the show began:
“Two little blackbirds
Sitting on a hill,
One named Jack – “
Dad held up his right papered finger –
Jack – and, likewise, the other–
“One named Jill.”
I’d seen him do this a half dozen times. He had to be in the right mood.
The birds were pieces of white paper but I saw them as crows sitting
on a hill above a cornfield.
Without warning Dad said “Fly away Jack!” He jerked the right hand
over his shoulder so fast we flinched.
Just as quick the hand came back to its place – no paper on the finger!
No Jack! Before we knew, he called, “Come back, Jack!”
Again the hand flitted backward and returned to place. There was Jack.
Johnny, the youngest, leaped up and looked behind Dad’s ear – just what
I did the first few times. I doubted the magic but I hadn’t quite solved the trick.
I didn’t really want to know. I was, in fact, afraid to learn how the game worked:
Once you mess with the magic you can’t go back.
Dad repeated the same routine for Jill. When Jill flew away and
the bare finger returned, Johnny inspected Dad’s hair looking for her.
“Where she go?” Johnny asked.
“Ain’t gone no place, John Lee,” Doc said calmly.
He had not flinched when Dad sent Jill over his shoulder. Johnny was still looking for
Jill when Doc focused on Dad’s hand, pointed and said: “You change fingers.”
I was stunned. Doc was older and supposed to be smarter but he wasn’t that much older.
“What do you mean?” Dad asked, no longer the trickster. More like a teacher
coaxing an explanation from a bright student. Doc mimed the routine showing how
the index and middle fingers were swapped each time.
Dad fished a quarter out of his pocket and gave it to Doc.
Twenty-five cents was two whole candy bars in those days.
“I knew it, too,” I said.
“No you didn’t, son,” Dad said. “Doc figured it.”
I got red-faced mad. For years (okay, I hadn’t logged many hours on the planet)
I’d been fooled by that trick. The last couple times I more or less let myself be fooled.
It was magic and it made Dad a wondrous and mysterious Oz-Man. But Doc was
not playing the game. Doc and John Lee were dirt poor sons of an Alabama |
sharecropper. They didn’t go in for kid games. Doc got it the first time and called
it the way he saw it. Only adults did that–at least to my four-year-old’s understanding.
Fly away Jack! Fly away Jill!
Fast-forward: I got shoved through the veil of make-believe and the always threatening
questions in my brain became incessant. Everything I loved about life, sounds colors
tastes smells–was it all tomfoolery? My brother said the sky wasn’t blue, we just thought
it was blue. If you squeezed your nose you could bite into an onion and not taste it.
A radio song said there were answers in the wind. Lies! The wind knocked baby birds
out of trees and the cats ate them and the cats got shoved into dirt holes when
they stopped moving. What kind of happy hunting ground was that?
I didn’t want to be a skeptic–I wanted magic. When sex and drugs finally
arrived I thought I’d hit the jackpot. That quest took me loop d’loop
through the butt cheeks of hell.
Jack fell down and broke his crown; Jill came tumbling after.
What was their crime? They went to fetch a pail of water. Fucking water!
Shit happens. It ain’t right. A guy like me needs a little more … something.
Like … A draft of supernatural Kool-Aid would hit the spot right about now.
Sure: Magical thinking is brain rot that dissembles to quasi-mystical claptrap
and post-New Age hooey. Does that rule-out Wonder or even a love of Fate
when I’m not scared to death of dying? Science is cool
but the more I learn the less I want to know.
Question: Why is the universe expanding?
Answer: To get the hell away from us!
I’ve worked hard and paid dearly for magic potions and spells ever since I was breast-fed
and bottle-weaned. The expiration date has long passed on altered states that demand
painful re-entry fees. I hate impermanence! Then again all stories revolve around change.
That’s the problem isn’t it? Spinning spheres, repetitive, circular, seasonal life.
Magic is the thing that stops the merry-go-round, lifts the brain out of its darkened
vault and for an infinite moment of stop-time suspends all motion.
Then we see! Then … we don’t.
Sigh.
Dad rewarded Doc for not being fooled. It was a good lesson. But I will always yearn for
that lost time that ended when Papa called those two paper birds home
from a hill in my virginal imagination.
“Come back Jack! Come back, Jill!”
Franklin Crawford is a long time journalist,
and Editor of
TinyTownTimes.com.
