You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Most everybody else didn’t realize that we lived in that web of magic, connected by the silver filaments between chance and circumstance; but I knew it all along. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We were born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside of us. We are born able to sing to birds, read clouds, and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it jerked out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age, and you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they had allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it, just seconds, knowing and remembering. When people get weepy in movies, it’s because in that dark theater, the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up and they are left feeling a little heart-sad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track in the night in the distance and you wonder where it may be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instances, you have stepped into the magic realm; that’s what I believe.