Everyday Magic

It was 1974. High summer in Bedford Hills, New York, a small hamlet an hour north of the city. A little boy was playing in his driveway, bouncing a superball as high as he could. On the 22nd bounce, that superball went so high that it disappeared into the sky.

As the boy peered up into the blue, shading his eyes, everything around him was still. No bird song. No dog bark. No car horn. A moment later, an enormous shower of dandelions fell all around him. He was engulfed in a cascade of buttery blossoms, the scent of deep taproot in the air. The boy stood there, considering what had just happened and grieving the loss of his superball. Then he skipped off to find his dog.

I believe there is magic in this world. Huge swathes of things that operate beyond our cognition and escape our awareness. But, as far as I can tell, that magic doesn’t come with strange rules or arcane trappings. It’s an everyday kind of thing. Music, for instance, and its power to influence our emotions. Stories and other feats of imagination that take us out of ourselves. Fleeting natural phenomenon that crack us open. (Double Rainbow guy is a particularly vivid example of this one.) It’s all around us, if we can only get ourselves into the state of mind that permits us to see it. Like the little boy in the dandelion shower.

That boy was Russell Langsam. Mystical ballplayer and musical badass, Russell was the first person to correctly name the Waterboys as the inspiration for my recent post “This is the Sea.” His special powers are wit, conversation, parenting, and a drive to do work in this world that has value in human terms. He is magic, and so are you.

Russell doesn’t particularly care for the Waterboys, but I am still sharing the song “This is the Sea” below, in his honor, so that some of its magic may guide him to extraordinary, double-rainbow-across-the-sky opportunities. (Photograph above by Andy Goldsworthy)