A Good Day for Magic
We humans believe the future will be like the past. We think history repeats, we think there are patterns. We think history teaches us that mankind learns nothing from history.
It’s easy to believe in no possibility.
I’ve been stuck in this for a while. Fell into the paradigm most people live in all their lives. Gotta pay the bills. Busy, busy. Same old, same old, they say. Short hand for, My life is all about surviving and I’m tired and bored, so I turn to screens. Or food. That new Mexican place, McDonald’s new bacon cheese jalapeño whatever with extra secret sauce.
I work among people who do the same thing over and over for thirty years. Things vary a little. A new class to teach, new curriculum, their own kids growing older, growing up. Pre-school, elementary, middle, high school. Soccer, football, college. Then they get jobs and the whole thing repeats.
That’s how it looks to me, an outsider disguised as an insider. I’ve been in the schools for eight years, and I’m bored. Yes, I worked at the juvenile detention center, which I loved until it ended. Then five years in high school, four of them seeing one kid all the way through, going with him to all of his classes. Brandon became—and is still—my friend and I stayed to support him.
The last three years I wanted to leave. I wrote pieces called Flight Risk and Greener Pastures.
I saw him through, watched him graduate, moments when my childless life converged with the life of a mom, Brandon’s mom. Mother to twin boys leaving the nest, off to college. She’s free.
I’m not free, though. Still have to pay off my house before my time is my own. I quit my job and become a substitute teacher.
There’s something pathetic about substitutes. They aren’t the real thing and everyone knows it. Especially the kids.
So I’m trudging along, paying the bills and dreaming of greener pastures. Like a horse, I fret and kick and chew on the fence, then go back to plodding. Seems like this will never end, an endless stretch of future just like this.
In theory I know better, but surviving makes me tired. It saps my energy for living. I wake up at three AM one night and tell myself I have got to do something. I’m dying. Survival is killing me.
And yet, once in a while there is magic. Magic is not the opposite of science—which we worship to an unhealthy degree, I think. Magic is something real that happens, that doesn’t need an explanation, analysis, charts or graphs or data. Magic is a surprise, a blessing, a gift.
Like this.
The very next morning after not much sleep, I drive to school to find… a museum, set up right next to my classroom. The Burke Mobile, a traveling exhibit of Native culture and objects. There’s time before the bell. I go.
Baskets, beadwork, moccasins. Gorgeous stuff. And a display on fishing. Something in my mind surfaces, jumps, lands with a splash. Gooey ducks! I have friends in the tribes and long ago one invited me out on the boat to document them diving for gooey ducks.
This was when I made my living as a photographer, and adventures found me all the time. A gooey duck boat, two weeks in the wilderness with donkeys. Come with us to Spain, Hawaii, Fiji. I lived in greener pastures.
This display says nothing about gooey ducks. I tell the woman in the Burke T-shirt I have photos of Quinalt people gooey duck diving. Would she like them?
“Yes,” she says, “Absolutely. We’ll pay you for them and respect your copyright. We won’t put them on our website. How do you like to meet? Zoom? Phone? I like to meet in person,” she says.
She likes to meet in person. Have I died and gone to heaven?
We make a plan for me to go to the Burke Museum with my negatives.
The day has completely changed. The grass is looking pretty green here at Apollo Elementary School. My future is not like the past few years. Magic happens sometimes.