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Little Bits of Magic
MICHELLE AUERBACH
One Sunday afternoon in late August, my three kids and I were sitting by a creek with a friend and her two kids. We were skimming stones. The water was flat and turgid; drought season in Colorado. My friend, Brette, found a heart-shaped stone.
“I collect heart shaped stones or I take pictures of them,” she said as she showed it to us.
My son said, “Cool.”
Lying in bed that night, heat-stroked and tired from sun and water, I remembered the last heart-shaped stone I found.
When I was ten or eleven, I thought of myself as a sorceress. I did consent to masquerade as a sixth grader at Ludlow Elementary School, but even there, Matt and I always knew we were condescending to look like plain old kids. My best friend, Matt, was a wizard and knew as many spells as I did.
Matt had to practice the violin, and unless we unleashed our powers, nothing would fix that. Violin practice took time, and though I read under the piano while he practiced, it felt as though it kept us apart, it felt deeply unfair. While we were motivated to do something about this problem the only way we could - that is without magic powers - it felt wrong to use magic on our parents.
This led us to wrestle with the ethics of our situation.
When and where do you use magic and who do you let in on your secret?
We came to this conclusion: magic is sacred, private, and to be saved for the stream at the golf course where we became our true mythic selves, and nowhere else.
We developed a code of writing in runes so that we could communicate about the mythic world while we skimmed through the school day. We never talked on the phone. We weren’t completely comfortable at school and definitely not at home.
The only safe place for us was the creek.
Matt and I lay on our stomachs for hours trying to levitate stones. We found a spot by the creek at the golf course near my house, and we searched for the perfect stone of the right size and heft. Too big, and it would be impossible, too small and it would be too easy. Flattish was best, so that you could get a better mental grip on the stone.
“Did you see that one? Did it almost move?” he asked.
“No, it might have, I couldn’t see.” I said.
What must have happened, we consoled ourselves, was that we had lost the power stone. The key to teaching us our magical powers was in this stone. Without it we were bound by the rules of this earthly plane.
That stinks, we thought.
The search started for the power stone.
We re-read our favorite books, we went to the library (almost as safe as the stream), and looked in every text we could find. We found no reference to power stones, but I noticed that there were not many female sorcerers.
At home my mom was getting divorced. From her second husband. No one else had parents who were divorced –even once, let alone twice. I thought better of mentioning this development to my friends at school. I was too ashamed to tell Matt.
I am sure their parents knew. Everyone knew. It was a small and gossipy town, and my mom was having an especially juicy divorce.
One night just after my step-dad moved out, I found myself curled up in a ball inside the bottom of my cube nightstand, shaking. I called Matt when I failed to get him telepathically. He was going on and on, as only an eleven- year-old boy can, about the make up of the power stone.
“Gordon moved out.” I said.
“Oh.” He said. At least he shut up.
“I’m scared.” I said.
“Oh.”
“Do you hate me?” I asked.
“What?”
And nothing changed. He never mentioned it again. I still felt that if anyone knew about my mom, they would be disgusted. We went on reading Tolkien, the Mabinogion, the Kalevala, Hesiod’s Theogony, Lloyd Alexander, geology textbooks- anything, hoping for some sign about the stone.
One day something happened. We were at the creek and I moved a rock. A small one. Almost too small. A thumbnail sized gray stone, nondescript, except that it looked like a heart.
“You really moved that one.” Matt said, letting me know he knew we were leading each other on before, but this time it was for real.
“I know. I felt it. I felt something leap out of the sky, through my head, and make the stone move.”
I gave him the stone to examine. He held it but didn’t try to move it. It was mine. He handed it back to me and I put it in my pocket. I always wore jeans and never skirts. In my life as a sorceress I would have gowns, but on this plane, Levis.
I wanted to give Matt the stone. He needed to learn to move rocks too. It was part of being a journeyman sorcerer. But he didn’t ask for it and I didn’t mention it. I mumbled something and ran home.
Matt, bless him, never mentioned the power stone again. I could never have given it up. I carried it everywhere. It protected me from the stares of my classmates and the shame I felt when I saw my mom leave the house on a date. It was the power stone we had searched for - that’s for sure.
I still have that stone in a tiny jar. A jar my mom’s third husband, the one I call Dad, who gave me away at my wedding, brought me from India.
The only feeling I have had anything close to the feeling of moving that rock was in childbirth - that I was meant to do this, I cannot think about it, and all I need to do is get out of the way. What reached through me to move that stone was exactly what moved through me to give birth to three children: love.
Since the day Brette showed us the heart shaped stone, my family has started finding them everywhere. Stones are little bits of magic to be used when you need it.
I disagree with the ethics of magic that Matt and I constructed twenty odd years ago. Magic is not secret, nor is it private, nor is it to be used sparingly. The kind of magic I found in the power stone is to be found by anyone who wants it, just strewn around on creek banks – and a good thing too.
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