Magical Moments
Your first kiss, your wedding day, the birth of your child, these are all magical moments. I have been blessed with all of these and some very unexpected ones. And the real surprises started with the birth of my son.
When I was a kid I was fascinated by the likes of Doug Henning, Harry Blackstone Jr., and David Copperfield. I plunged head long into trying to learn “how they did that.” Back then it was very hard to find what in my mind were suitable books to learn from, but learn I did and even gave some mediocre performances as a teen. But as with many things you do when you’re young, I slowed down and other things that interest teens halted my magic career. I did the occasional trick here and there for friends and family but the impetus was gone.
That is until July 31st 2005. On that day my life and my magic were changed forever. My son Cooper was born. Now you may ask how this changed my magic, but boy did it. Many fathers have dreams of what their children will be when they grow up, and I am no different. Some just wait and see. Some just guide them. And others may even force the issue to their utter disappointment. What is different is that Cooper seems to have made that choice for the both of us.
It all started the morning after he was born. It was five thirty in the morning and I couldn’t resist going to the nursery to see him and feed him for the first time. I entered the nursery and said, “Where’s my boy?” The nurse pointed to a woman who had beat me to the punch, but when he heard me, he stopped eating and started looking for me. Here he was, seven hours old and he already new my voice. I fairly burst with pride because he was that sharp. Of course I knew he was a cunning little so and so. Through the entire pregnancy I only felt him kick a handful of times. He had this knack for knowing when my hand was about an inch from my wife’s tummy and quit the kicks. And no matter how long I held my hand there, he wouldn’t budge. I swear it was a game to him. I even tried tricking him, but to no avail. So since I missed the feeding, I decided to take him to our room and visit with mommy. Little did I know what was in store for us that first day.
We were bonding and since Leslie, my wife, ended up having an emergency c-section she tired easily. Who wouldn’t after stalling out after eighteen hours of labor followed by major surgery? So after a few hours of playing musical parents we decided to take him to the nursery and let her get some rest. These days in the hospital you have all kinds if identification fail safes and an electronic tether. In order to take the newborn out of the nursery you have to read off identification numbers (from both his i.d. and mine) and the same when returning him. He had a wrist bracelet, one on his ankle, and the tether on his other ankle. On our return to the nursery, we went in and proceeded to go through the number ritual and lo and behold, no wrist bracelet. We never found it. We looked every conceivable place, but no luck. Suffice it to say I was impressed. He had performed his first escape. The rest of the day went on pretty normally, or as normal as the parade of relatives and doctors checking on us can get anyway. Maybe it was a fluke, I thought, but he up and did a repeat performance the next day.
It came time for his hospital picture and having no idea how they did them, was wondering if we would be called to take him somewhere. Well, this girl knocks and enters with a cart mounted with a monitor and camera. So I go get Cooper from the nursery, complete with a whole new set of tags (put on much tighter this time) and return to our room to get him ready. I took out his outfit for the portrait from its zip locked baggie and dressed him in his cart. Then I handed him off to the photographer. She took seven proofs and while Les was picking which shots she liked, I got him back into his hospital gear. I put his clothes in the self same baggie and zipped it. I took him to the nursery, only about fifty feet down the hall from our room, and when I got there to compare bracelets, POOF! It was gone again! This one was on so tight it nearly bit into his little wrist. We searched his cart, clothes, the hall, our room, his diaper, and his clothes in the baggie. I mean everywhere. It turns out you can even see his bracelet in one of the proofs. That’s when the nurses started calling him Houdini Jr. I was flabbergasted. And it also had me thinking about magic in a whole new light.
Actually it had me worried about what he’d be capable of by the time he went to school, etc. I even pictured him hustling Three Card Monte on the playground by age five. So I figured I had better step up my game. I broke out a deck of cards and all my old books and went to work. On day three he did the bracelet escape yet again and I knew I had the right idea. I would train in the art and share it with Cooper when he was old enough since he seemed to have a gift for it. That and I would be able to keep ahead of him and be able to instill proper ethics at the same time. I thought, “We are going to have a lot of fun with this when he’s older.” Well older came a lot sooner than I thought.
Before he was a week old, I’m reading in my den, it’s twelve thirty at night, and soon it would be feeding time. Leslie was bed bound for several days after coming home, so I took on the baby duty. I hear him wailing away and take his bottle to his room and find him missing his diaper and it’s open and all the way across his crib. And he soaked himself from head to toe. After the initial laughter died away I started wondering how a baby, almost a week old could’ve done such a thing. He only did the diaper escape a couple more times, but I never caught him at it. As a result I started working harder and even started taping my practice sessions with him in the room. He loved watching my antics and mistakes. During these was when I first started seeing him smile.
Five months flew by and I was working on back palming when he started crying to beat the band and nothing would quiet him. Then it hit me, he wanted to play with some cards too. So I positioned him a little higher in his bouncy chair and gave him one. To my utter amazement he was trying a back palm. He had the grip just about perfect and when he couldn’t twist the card into the right position, he did it with his other hand! He always saw it from the audience’s point of view, but he had it figured out! He loved watching me vanish and produce cards before, but nothing like this had ever happened. I had gotten into card manipulation because even though I had given up magic, I still loved watching it and had several shows on tape, Jeff McBride being my favorite and Cooper’s too. But this had me absolutely floored.
Since then, he’s mocked the Squeeze Production, and several other “moves.” I’ve also started working with coins, which now are his favorite playthings. I can’t practice until he gets a couple of silver dollars to monkey around with too. He even tried to show my sister a couple of tricks like coin splitting and he has attempted a coin roll or two. Mind you, he can’t do them yet, but it was fun watching him place the coin between his fingers and shake his hand trying to get it to flip. And yes, of course I did the Coin Out of the Ear effect for him. And one day when visited by my little sister he took his dollar out of his own ear with all the confidence of a pro and said, believe it or not, “Ta Dah!”
These days he’s running around and exploring more. He still likes to occasionally practice along with daddy, but not as much as in the “old days”. He has a whole world to explore and I can’t blame him. But thanks to those little magical moments, we have something special that we and we alone can share. And I have a whole world besides the mundane one we live in to show him. I’ve already bought him his first magic set, and have been expanding my already large library of books, which were mostly my favorites and anything I thought would be a benefit to Cooper’s education. From Jules Verne to Homer. Now I’m building my magic library in hopes his interest in the art never wanes. So far he enjoys every minute of my magic and the magic of his smile at those times almost brings a tear to my eye every time. Those smiles and his giggles are now the most magical moments of my life. And when we do magic together, it’s just beyond words to explain the pride I feel in my little boy. He’s my friend, my son, and my inspiration. I just hope that everyone has just one moment like this in his or her life. I know I’m grateful beyond words that I have and hope they never stop…………
Janos – Amateur Magician and proud father