Like most kids in grade-school, I participated in fads, and every once in a while, I would inevitably be stacking cards from a deck in some bizarre fashion to demonstrate an interesting or obscure mathematical principle. This was back in the day when I had a deck of cards, grimy, bent, well-traveled. It was before they became as expendable as ziplock bags, groceries or packs of gum.
One year, my parents took my brother and I to see Lance Burton at The Louisville Palace. We wondered at the intricacies of the architecture before the show even began. When Lance came out and introduced himself as a fellow Kentuckian, I felt a warm sense of pride rush through me. The man on the stage, in his fine suit with tails and gloves started where I did.
Of the wonders we saw that night, a few stick out, dominant in my memory, all these years later. At one point, Lance levitated a glowing light-bulb over the audience. If that moment were part of a movie, I'm sure scenes of me performing magic on Hillcrest Ave on Halloween nights later in life would have glimmered in my eyes against the unnatural light of the floating bulb. He ended the show by having a sword fight with a masked villain, and when the collective gasps of the audience filled the theatre after Lance Burton's supposed defeat, The villain ripped the mask from his face to reveal that he was Lance all along.
As the years passed, and my interest in magic fluctuated, I never forgot that floating light. Of course, I knew it was a trick. I could have researched how it was done. There must have been strings or something, unseen, supporting it in its journey over the heads of the spectators. But I never did. I left the memory how it was, a seed of wonder and inspiration that always reminded me of how powerful what we don't know can be in our lives. In this day and age, finding wonder or avoiding a secret can be difficult. That's why, even if I could fool people for a second with a deck of cards, I could tap into that wonder, no matter how temporarily.
That light-bulb has lead me through my early adult life in interesting ways. It put a smile on the face of family members as we were going through a difficult divorce, it's brightened up parities and given me a new tradition on Halloween, it's given me unique moments in relationships, taken me to England to see Derren Brown and into the books of Braue, Vernon and Harris. So, no matter what role magic continues to play in my life from this point on, even if it remains a hobby I can rely on to make people smile, that simple light-bulb trick changed me in a drastic way. That's the moment I was bitten, and that's why, even in my book-bag now, as I make my way through grad-school, there is always deck of cards, waiting to shine on the people in my life.