Magic

Remember when everything we played was magical?

My dad recently found our old childhood piano sheet music, most of which I don’t remember except for the songs we each got to pick one year. Jordan picked My Heart Will Go On because, hello, Titanic was the most epic movie that had ever been made at that point. Ty picked Eric Clapton Tears in Heaven. The youngest, I picked Lion King. I’m honestly not sure if I learned any of the songs on the piano, but my best friend and I used that book and the lyrics all the time to create a game we played every sleepover we had. I haven’t seen that book in years, but wow, did the most specific memories come flooding back.

We used my small boom box to make our own “radio station,” but instead of playing songs, we sang them – starting with every single song from Lion King. It was obviously what our imaginary listeners wanted. I was Liz (and quite bossy, shocking no one), she was Mel; we did commercials, bits between songs, and recorded every song, each of us with different parts, on an old taped-over cassette. Our name for the radio show was JJS, utterly unoriginal and the exact name of our local station. 

We’d start each show with: “Hi! I’m Liz!” “And this is Mel, and….”  ….[together in awkward unison!] “Welcome to WJJS! We appreciate you being here listeners, and have a great show lined up for you today….” We’d trade solos, forget lines, get a case of the giggles in the middle, do holiday specials depending on the time of year, sing our school choir songs, and often whispered so we wouldn’t wake our parents up. If we did, we’d fling the comforter over the radio, throw our heads onto the pillows, and close our eyes in fake sleep. I’m sure it was extremely convincing at 2am.

After our show, we’d rewind it back – those chunky buttons to press rewind – and listen to what we’d recorded, laughing hysterically at how bad it was, and rewinding again until our stomachs hurt and tears ran down our faces. We’d eventually get tired and go to sleep far too late, sliding the boom box back on to the bedside table. One year, our family got a small cam-corder for Christmas, which gave us the opportunity for some pretty stellar choreography, right as Boy Bands were dominating the world. Our dances were….well, think of the opposite of those cool rhizzy kids on tik tok, and add even more awkward.  

It was quite a time to be alive and just hitting double digits.

We also had a game called “Movies,” which we played religiously. The game consisted of:

• two old telephones, which we would answer regularly to take reservations for movie tickets.
• two reservation notebooks, in which we would messily scrawl out the movie name and number of people going to see it, as well as the show time – phone tucked so adult-like between our chin and shoulder, just like our moms did.
• a stack of my dad’s old computer paper, the kind you could tear off the hole-lined edges. Do you remember that paper? How satisfying it was to fold on the perforated line, and rip that strip off? We took the edge for our ticket stub receipt, after writing out the movie ticket info on the paper part. It was very personalized service.
• my wooden trunk or a table pulled out in the middle of the room to slide tickets across to entirely non-existent people, who were either extremely gracious or extremely rude. We perfected our customer service, and occasionally practiced flirting with also-non-existent boys who often came to buy movie tickets from our booth. You know, just to see us.
• an intercom/phone line directly to “the snack boys,” whom we would call with the snack orders so they’d be ready for the customer to pick up– the more ridiculous the order, the better. The Snack Boys (also, not real) were not bright, so we often had to repeat ourselves, shaking our head, and looking at each other like “WTF is WRONG with these boys???” But, you know, late 1990’s lingo, so more like “What the dilly, yo?” or “Sup with that?”

We tried to get our moms to play this with us a few times. It had to be the most boring 20 minutes of their year. We decided they didn’t know how to play very well, so released them back into real life, asking them to close the door so we could continue Movies.

In the daytime, we were often outside, roaming the apartment complex where Marly lived – rolling down hills, feeding fish in the pond, climbing on the playground – too big to play of course-  while we talked about important things or memorized the lines to All Star by Smashmouth.

In my backyard, we discovered a maybe 4 by 4 square of old bricks in the back behind a bunch of trees and bushes. They were right beside the bank of a creek that ran back there, and I use the word creek very loosely – it was a small trickle of water that had always been one of my brothers’ and my favorite places to play, and where Ty’s muddy basketball often ended up if it hit the driveway’s edge wrong and went flying across the yard past the trees.

Anyway, we decided that square of bricks was our castle, in a kingdom called Evergreen Cove – due to the pine trees that hid it and water that flowed through. I was Princess Ruth. She was Princess Mary Anne. We each had symbols, and eventually created our own written language so we could write in code.

Hours. We spent HOURS in Evergreen Cove.

We fought dragons that were constantly trying to attack our people. We wrote a national anthem and delivered speeches regularly, gluing two sticks on each paper’s edge so it would unroll like a scroll.  We invented a sport on an old abandoned swing set in someone else’s nearby backyard that had a set rings which we called Barhandswins and held Olympics for. We won, of course. We used fight moves from Star Wars to perfect our battle prep. We built and painted an alter to Sparlamento and Chard, the two wizards who bestowed magic and protection on our kingdom. We rescued two abandoned babies (who were, in fact, cement blocks that we painted faces on with nail polish, despite having a million dolls in the house), who would inherit the kingdom from us one day. We spoke to the animals in the magnolia tree we often climbed, particularly the squirrels who were our allies.

Evergreen Cove always came alive when we rang an old set of wind chimes my parents had hanging on a low branch in our yard. That was the signal that transformed the backyard from a plain old backyard with a tiny creek and forgotten bricks to an entire kingdom.

These are just memories from one friendship, not even including the countless other childhood adventures with my brothers and cousins and other friends.

One of my favorite books, Boy’s Life (if you know, you know), has a line in it that I had written on a sticky note hanging by my desk for years. It said,

“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians…. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand.”

I have three kids now. They invent their own games, that seem weird and a little boring to us grown ups, but gosh I hope they get lost in them. I hope they create worlds so intricate, it takes them an hour to type them up one day while they sit on the couch looking out the window, waiting for spring and remembering the best parts of childhood, wishing that perhaps we didn’t have so many screens and streaming services available 24/7 for our children and teenagers and grown ups.

Yesterday was the first truly warm day of sunshine here, where you could see the green almost bursting from the trees against a hopeful blue sky. I watched the kids – a whole band of our tribe –  running through the woods to where we could barely see them, chasing, inventing, experimenting, playing. Watching them, I thought – this is it. This is what I hope they remember.

I hope they are finding magic. In tree bark and under leaves, in the moments they are bored at home and start making something, in the hours with their friends dashing around outside or holed up in their rooms creating an elaborate game or show that the adults can barely follow. I hope they build kingdoms and run a movie theater and laugh until their stomachs hurt over the silliness. I hope they find magic.

And something I am realizing more and more is that it’s important to remember our own. That joy still resides within us, like a light. 

What did you play when you were young?

What worlds did you create?

What magic did you hold in your hands?