Magic on a Monday

Boy’s Life has been one of my favorite books since I was about nineteen years old. A friend gave it to me who said he read it every year or so when the honeysuckle bloomed. It’s about a 12-year-old boy coming of age in a small southern town in the 60’s…. but more than that, much more than that:  it’s about magic.

You can call magic whatever you want.

Imagination. Our inner child. Creativity. Faith. Youth. Nostalgia. Believing. Playfulness. Woo-woo. Joy.

He tells us right there in the book. We’re all born with it.

“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.”

Oh, those words. I used to have them written on a sticky note in green pen, taped to the front of every desk I sat at. Now, the sticky notes have changed, but they still breathe magic daily. The first time Bria wrote I love you Mom, backwards letters and a shape resembling a heart. A loose interpretation of a giraffe by Adalyn, spots neatly in a row. Bryce’s scrawling scribbles of cartoons, covered in stickers. My babies are my closest source of magic right now. Like Cory’s monsters hung in his bedroom that soothe him and protect him, my kids’ sticky notes and patches of art calm my soul and ground me. Remind me to believe in the biggest magic I can.

Another friend teased me for loving to re-read books. You’ve already read this! he said. Why re-read it when there are hundreds of new books to read? True. Solid point.

But re-reading a book years later? It’s either like coming back to a dear friend’s house and telling the same stories that make you laugh and cry and love life together. Or it’s like reading a new book entirely, because your perspective is completely different.  

For example, re-reading Hunger Games -now as a parent – threw me for about a million loops, given the parallels to today’s world, as opposed to the first time I read it 14+ years ago, pre-kids and pre…. [gestures vaguely to the mess that is our country currently].

Re-reading Boy’s Life, as a 40ish year-old adult, makes me look closer at my soul. Do I still have whirlwinds and comets inside me? Does my heart still know magic? As a parent, its wandering stories and tales make me hope and watch my kids for signs of believing, finding real joy, hopping on their bikes and searching for river monsters and flying like birds at the end of the school year. Boy’s Life, as a daughter of almost 70-year-old parents, makes me sob at the end upon Cory visiting his childhood home and talking with his dad – the simple but immense gratitude for good parents. Boy’s Life, as a keeper of magic, makes me want to stand in our yard and listen to the birds and feel the wind and fix Grandma’s typewriter (always a magic box) that sits in our basement. Boy’s Life, as a writer, makes me soak in both the whimsy and the complex wheels and different gears in his writing. Boy’s Life makes me miss the smell of honeysuckle at the bay’s boardwalk fence, where we walked to the water from Jean’s. And it reaffirms what I already believe, that she and those I miss so dearly on the other side overlap with our world all the time.

This book brings me joy.

And by the same edge, every tragedy in it feels bigger to me, too, both because I have lived my own, and because I cannot fathom enduring more loss. And yet, I know we all will. Life goes on in the book, the pages keep turning. Life goes on for us too. Against all odds, the world keeps turning.

I still grapple with how grief and this going-on of life works, the ways we carry our sorrows, and the bittersweet sound of a page turning without someone in the next chapter. Life shouldn’t go on, and yet it does. Somehow, this book encapsulates this ying-yang fact of life in ways I did not understand before loss truly hit me.

I gave this book to a friend who has two boys and could feel every ounce of ‘boy’ in this book….Her sons are around Cory’s age, jumping on their bikes for adventures and figuring out who they are…. So much of this book is the glory of a twelve-year-old boy, and given that, she said she couldn’t figure out why it was in my top 3. I laughed and said I grew up with two older brothers whom I followed everywhere I could. I basically was a twelve year old boy, for all intents and purposes. This book holds the essence of my own childhood.  

But more than that.

It’s the magic.

Tonight I took our dog out, and fireflies were lighting up in the denser shadows of the evergreens. What tiny miracles, I thought. Bugs who glow on summer nights, blinking on and off in the trees. How magical.

I’m such a grown up most of the time. I need to get laundry done. I have emails to send, spreadsheets to fill, lists to check. I’m making my children learn new vocabulary and practice geography this summer. I love a Kroger coupon and cannot fathom being anywhere but our bed after 9:30pm. I think some of today’s music is as noisy as our grandparents thought the Beatles were, and routine is my comfort.

But I still love the way it feels when you pop out the middle of an ocean wave perfectly, weightless for that moment while the rest of the sea water crashes towards the sand. I believe the smell of a Christmas tree is healing. I kind of love the ridiculous notion that octopuses are aliens. I always name things with wheels, especially the ones that take me places. I believe I heard our first baby boy on what should have been his first birthday. I find the science of stardust mystical and lean solidly into the ethereal whenever possible. I don’t ride a bike much anymore, but I do talk to my plants and whisper to the ocean.

Just as life always has stress and sorrows that shake us and eat at us, life also has given us magic. Within us and around us on this wild globe floating through space. It is alive as the trees and real as air in our lungs.

And magic, you know….it has a strong, strong heart.

I hope you feel it beating today.