Magic Moment

Through no fault but my own, I became known, at work, for creating certain kinds of mainframe computer software systems. My programs surprised, and pleased people, and made them think about their work in a whole different way. This was back when not so many people were doing that.

Anyway, there was this guy, who was in the group I was in, but a couple of levels up from me, an associate director of something, but more sophisticated and refined than we usually got assigned to us, an Italian, but you wouldn't know it, just hearing him talk, all uptown New York, very relaxed, competent, and so friendly, in a real and genuine way, that you knew he had to be a snake underneath.

I liked the guy. At happy hour, he would always come up and kiss me on my forehead. I don't remember him doing that to any of the other guys. Or girls, for that matter. It just seemed to be a quiet gesture of friendliness between two confident men. I was impressed with him for that. It was the eighties.

Once, a group of us were at somebody's house and everybody was talking, and somebody started talking about magicians, so I told about how, when I was a kid, I liked to amaze people, doing magic.

This guy I'm talking about said, "You're still doing it."

Nobody heard him. Except me.

I never found the snake in that guy.

Do You Believe in Magic?

After the kids were gone and we had reclaimed the house, I started thinking about the time when I was Andrew's age and all I thought about was doing magic tricks and putting on shows.

I was serious about it - I wanted to be a professional magician.

I got catalogs from all the big magic stores - like Douglas Magicland in Dallas, and Abbott's Magic Company in Colon, Michigan. These catalogs were full of pictures of silver rings and brass tubes and multi-colored foulards, and smoke, and mirrors, and common everyday objects like milk pitchers and golf balls that could stupefy the mind. And everything was for sale!

All my money, from birthdays, Christmas and occasional petty theft, went to these places. And I got all this great stuff back that looked just the way it did in the catalogs. It was a thrill just getting it in the mail. To me, it was like, magic.

But that wasn't why I wanted it so bad. What made it worth the money was finding out how the tricks worked. I was amazed at how sneaky the guys were who thought all that stuff up. But finding out was like joining a club. Putting on magic acts was secondary.

I got the magic bug early in life. When I was about five, whenever my father drew babysitting duty, he would take me downtown to the financial district, where all the pawnshops were. He knew everybody down there. We would visit and he'd show off his kid. When we got to the end of the street, he would look back and say, "They're all bums."

One of the places we went in, you had to walk down some steps to get to the entrance. It was called The Fun Shop, where jokes, novelties and magic tricks were on display and for sale. If you needed a whoopee cushion or a joy buzzer in those days, this was your place.

One time, the guy who worked there laid a penny out on the counter, right in front of me, and then brought out a small, square block of wood, that had green felt on the bottom and was painted red on the top. While my father and I looked on, he passed the little block over the penny, and the penny changed into a dime. Right in front of me.

I was astounded. I knew the guy did something, but I didn't know what it was. I begged my father to buy me that trick, just so I could find out how it worked. And so he did. He wanted to know how it worked, too.

From that humble beginning, I rose to a point where I was fourteen and known as a high roller in the best magic shops in the country.

Later on, I teamed up with Larry Copeland and we started putting on shows at school and other places. Once, we got a letter from the principal of Pearl High School, inviting us to do our act at their annual Talent Show. We found out that their Talent Show was a big deal in town and they didn't ask just anybody to show up. So we went.

That night, there were a couple of singing and dancing acts before us, and we saw that the audience wasn't just sitting around - they were letting everybody know whether they liked them or not. We started getting nervous.

When we came out, I did several tricks to warm up the crowd, but just got little murmurs back. Copeland did a few jokes and got some laughs, and the general mood seemed to pick up a bit. Then I pulled out a biggie from my bag - three large silk scarves, colored red, green and yellow, respectively, that I waved around until they somehow got transmogrified into one great big scarf with a sunburst of all the colors in it. That got a big response - everybody started yelling at me and themselves and everybody else, at the same time. It took a while before they settled down.

By and by, I was ready for the big closer, the Box of DUZ trick. The trick that never failed to start a riot. I was terrified. I looked over at Copeland. He whispered back, "You gotta do it, man."

The trick involved three white silk scarves that were all dirty with big splotches on them. And a cardboard box, the kind you might get popcorn in, but this one had "DUZ Soap" printed on the outside. The deal was, I was going to clean the scarves to their original pristine whiteness by putting them in the DUZ box and using it for a washing machine.

So, with a lot of snappy patter, I stuffed the dirty laundry into the DUZ box, closed the top and starting shaking it up and down. This didn't seem to accomplish much, so Copeland brought me a pitcher of milk and I poured the milk into the DUZ box. This got a little rise out of the crowd. I resumed shaking the box up and down and, while doing that, I slowly turned the DUZ box upside down. The "DUZ" label was now showing upside down, but only a couple of people seemed to see anything odd in that. When they started calling out about it, I pretended not to understand them.

Instead, with a flourish, I opened up the other end of the box and pulled out three sparkling white silks, entirely free of splotches. I held the silks up in one hand and the box in the other and took my bow.

But, by then, word was getting around about the box being upside down and there commenced a general row and eruption - they wanted me to open up the box. Several offered to come down and open it for me, if I didn't feel up to it. Copeland didn't make things any better. He started scratching his head and pointing at the box. Which, of course, he was supposed to do.

Eventually, I tore the box into little pieces, scattering it over the crowd, and everybody went crazy. We took a quick bow, grabbed our stuff and got offstage as fast as we could.

As it turned out, we won the Talent Show and got our names in the paper.

I decided I was on my way to becoming a professional magician. I told my father about it. He said, "Don't be a chump - go to college, become an engineer and make five thousand a year."

But I kept talking about it. One of the things I went on about was the annual magicians convention, which was held in Michigan. I wanted to go and hobnob with my brother wizards, but I knew there was no chance that my father would go for that.

Which shows what I knew about my father. He said, "Let's go."

So we drove to Michigan, the only time I remember ever going anywhere with just my father. The convention was held in this big theater in Sturgis. I got to see all the big magicians, on and off stage. My father sat out in the lobby area and watched all the sharpsters, some of whom were famous, doing their fancy card tricks. He seemed to be having a good time.

I caught up with him and asked him what he thought about the sleight-of-hand artists. He said, "They're all bums."

Magical Mystery Tour

Johnny Wilson has shamed me into writing something. I had run out of inspiration. But the prospect of having a reader has energized me to the point of putting pen to paper, as they used to say.

In casting around for a subject, my thoughts returned to last weekend when we had Andrew and Molly over for dinner, just themselves, while William and his parents were off following his many pursuits (now that he's a high school lad) and Andrew brought his magician's kit from last Christmas and he put on a magic act for us.

His apparatus were top-notch and his snappy patter showed that he had read the Magician's Handbook, that came with the kit, through and through. He had a magic wand that figured in several effects. And at one point, he pulled a toy rabbit out of a real-looking top hat that, before, had nothing in it.

I asked him if he could pull a hat out of a rabbit. He said he didn't have that trick yet.

Molly, over on the couch, followed our conversation without interest. She'd heard it all before. . . .

Looking for Love at the B&W

It's becoming widely known that Peggy Shackleford has a blog - http://www.pegshack.blogspot.com/ - which would be of interest to anyone who has ever known her.

One of her recent posts was devoted to memories of games and puzzles, like "Rook" and "Authors", and she told about being invited to join a bridge club. That shook loose a memory of mine when I was thirteen and learned something about girls.

Steve Scoggin's mother, Dot Scoggins, was a friend of my mother and a serious bridge player. One summer, she got Steve and me jobs at a big bridge tournament that was being held at the Maxwell House Hotel over a weekend.

She tried to impress Steve and me by saying that Goren and Jacoby would be there. We were not impressed. But we each got thirty dollars for being gophers at the event.

Mostly, we just had to hang out in a big room where a hundred and ten tables of bridge were going on. And, every now and then, we had to go get somebody a co-cola. We had to work Saturday and Sunday, so we had an overnight room in the hotel . And we had a lot of time to ourselves.

In that situation, we did what any two thirteen-year-old boys would have done. We made paper airplanes and flew them off the mezzanine to the lobby below. And we dropped water bombs out the seventh-story window of our room. Before the weekend was out, the Hotel Manager knew our names.

Saturday night, Steve and I were on our own for dinner, so we went to the B&W cafeteria, down the street from where we were staying. For some reason, the waiters sat us at a table with two cute girls about our same age. The four of us sat at the table and ate our food, and nobody said a word. The two girls gave each other little looks. I don't know if Steve was giving me looks because I was looking at my fried haddock.

When we left, the girls came out behind us. It was dark outside and a little nippy. Steve and I turned one way and the girls turned the other. At that point, one of the girls looked over her shoulder and gave a long, low whistle.

Steve and I went into emergency conference. Steve was beside himself. He said, "Let's go!" I was terrified. I couldn't make my feet move. I told him to go on without me. He didn't go.

I haven't seen Steve Scoggins in fifty years. My guess is, he's still mad at me.

The Disappeared House on the Gone Hill

During the first half of the last century, there was a fine, two-story brick house on Compton Avenue in Nashville. Compton was a hill in those days and the house sat right at the crest of it. I can easily imagine that hill, covered with snow in the wintertime for the benefit of sledders who would come from all around the area.

My mother, Ethel Young, was born in that house and lived there with her older sisters, Catherine and Virginia. Actually, I'm told that all three were birthed in Covington, Tennessee, out of a family tradition, and then brought home to the house on Compton. Dr. T. Hugh Young was paterfamilias to these children, with his wife, and their mother, Hazel, who had been a Crippen, until her marriage to Dr. Young. Despite this fact, Hazel's mother was a Gillespie, owing to a second marriage, following the death of Mr. Crippen. Dr. Young, it can be said without fear of contradiction, was descended from a long line of Youngs. His mother came from a long line of Dennisons. They all lived together in the house on Compton Avenue, including Aunt Nanny Penuel, following the death of Mr. Penuel.

Even though I never met her, Grandma Gillespie was the one I remember most clearly, because my mother talked more about her to me. In photographs, she was regal and elegant. And she painted - we had in our house, as I was growing up, a large oil painting of a sylvan landscape that always looked good to me. Grandma Gillespie seemed to be my mother's favorite.

Dr. Young was bald, but distinguished-looking. He graduated from the Vanderbilt Medical School and made a career of doing insurance medicals for the Life and Casualty Co. In pictures, he seems formal and stern in an old-line, patrician way, but he could smile broadly when the situation warranted it, as when he donned his Fez and marched in the Shriner's Parade. I have to hand it to him - you couldn't pay me to don a Fez.

Life in the Compton house, during my mother's childhood, was one of easy privilege, as it was practiced in those days. All the meals for the large family were prepared by the family cook, Sadie, who ruled the kitchen with the authority of an absolute despot. Even Dr. Young, himself, might be threatened with an iron skillet if he wandered into the kitchen, before dinner, in search of a drumstick.

Aunt Virginia says that Ethel loved animals as a girl and she was always befriending creatures and bringing them home. There's a story of her dragging a stray pony home, once. Mama must have been something of a tomboy. On weekends, she liked going with her father, searching for Indian relics in the countryside of Tennessee and Kentucky. Dr. Young was a noted collector of Indian relics, which didn't surprise me because I always thought he looked like an Indian.

Mama was a young girl during the twenties, which is probably lucky in that it saved her from flapperdom. She entered her teens in the early thirties, when things had calmed down a lot. Still, I have a memory of hearing that she learned to drive a car at age twelve and started smoking soon after that. In those days, that was living with reckless abandon.

One thing that I didn't appreciate until I was grown is how stunningly beautiful she was, but still with the fresh-faced look of a girl who looked good in her time, or in ours.

In the late thirties, a couple of things happened that separated her life up to that time from what it would become.

In December, 1937, she married Rinkey Blumen. One month later, her mother died.

Parents don't tell their children anything of importance about themselves. Mama never spoke of her mother to me, and I have no idea how she ever became involved with Rinkey Blumen.

I was curious enough, however, to ask her about it a few years ago. She said he was the only boy she knew who had a car.

They went on to have five children, all boys. I was the first.

I remember my early years as idyllic. I got my mother's undivided attention and a gold star in my book every time I did something good. And she introduced me to the family rituals of the time: on Sunday afternoons, if it was nice, she would take me to visit Aunt Nanny Penuel. Every Easter, Nanny always colored a dozen eggs and hid them around the house for me to find. Once, we made a visit in the summer, and when we left, I asked Mama about the strange smell in the house. Mama laughed. she said Nanny had forgotten where she hid a few of those Easter eggs.

Then, before I started school, David and Billy showed up. I had to adjust my claim on mama's attention.

She and Daddy seemed to get along really well in the early years, but over time, perceived slights accumulated on both sides to a point where they enjoyed nothing more than a loud argument, with yelling, each one saying unkind things about the other. Actually, I'm not sure they enjoyed it, but they did it a lot.

Mama could give as good as she got. In fact, an impartial observer might say that Daddy was overmatched. She had a fine temper and a sharp wit that came into play when she was angry. She was particularly sensitive to any feeling that she was getting the short end of the stick.

When she let out with these zingers, she wasn't trying to be funny, but sometimes it was hard to keep from laughing, because they were funny. A misplaced sense of propriety prevents me from giving any examples.

I remember, one time, my father came home with a solution to a problem that had vexed the family for some time - David and I were both carrying paper routes and we both needed cars, but there weren't enough to go around. We had three cars, so my father said that he would drive one, I would drive one, and David would have the third.

Mama fixed him with one eye and said, "What am I supposed to do?"

Clearly, Daddy's plan had a flaw. Mama offered a compromise.

She said, "That's fine. I'll just drive you to work every morning and pick you up every evening."

We became a four car family.

But I don't want to give you the wrong idea. I think Mama really enjoyed being the mother of three boys. She threw herself into cub scouting with gusto and was a perennial Den Mother. Rick Drewry remembers being in one of those dens. I think she got to work out all her tomboyish aspirations on the Scouting Movement.

She did it for so long that one year, to our astonishment, she was given The Long Rifle award, an honor that is usually bestowed on the scout of the year. She was the only Den Mother who had ever been recognized in that way. After that, she got more respect from the kids in the neighborhood - word went around that she had a rifle.

The year before I started Hillsboro, Mama's life took another sharp turn: she got pregnant, again. I guess the thought of dealing with four children into her forties sent her into a tailspin, because, for the next nine months, she sat on the couch and wouldn't talk to anybody. I didn't realize what was going on, but it had a big effect on me. I clammed up, too. Something went into myself and never came out again. Even when I was grown, and had figured out what happened, I was not able to act naturally around her or any of my brothers. What ever it was that had taken cover inside me couldn't understand why his Mama stopped talking to him.

She came out of her mood when she saw her new son. The advent of Rick, and later, Joel, chased her blues away and she threw herself into the business of managing five boys to adulthood. In the process, she must have made her peace with her life, the way we all have to do.

As she came out of this low period, she began a life-long feud with her doctors. When she had been depressed, they loaded her up with pills. When the depression lifted, the doctors thought she should keep taking the pills. She went along with their advice for a while, but one day she flushed all her pills down the toilet and refused to take any more. She said she never felt better in her life.

During this time, we would visit the house on Compton Avenue on rare occasions, usually at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I believe my cousins, Charlie and Doug, and cousin Catherine Ann, spent more time there than we did. Catherine Ann, in particular, learned cooking by the pinch from old Sadie.

My memories of Compton are few. I think Mama had a feud going on with her father, too - something about his taste in second wives. When his wife, Hazel, died, Dr. Young married a woman who had worked in his office. I don't know if she had been his nurse or his receptionist, but Margaret took pride in becoming the doyenne of Compton Avenue. At Christmas, she entertained us by playing a large, pedal harp that she kept in the front parlor. And no discouraging word was heard from anyone.

I remember one Thanksgiving, dinner was over and Dr. Young was having his cigar. No one had left the table. The conversation was light. I was still just a kid and didn't talk, myself.

Someone - probably Aunt Virginia - mentioned that I was a stamp collector. Aunt Virginia, herself, had a large collection of U.S. mint stamps and I had gotten interested from her. Anyway, Dr. Young asked me what kind of stamps I liked to collect and I said First Day Covers and Plate Number Blocks.

He smiled broadly and asked me if I had ever seen a Zeppelin First Day Cover. I said I'd never seen one, but I had heard about them - they were worth several hundred dollars each.

Dr. Young directed someone to fetch a box from an upstairs closet. It was set in front of him and he opened it with an air of formality and brought out 15 or 20 Zeppelin First Day covers. I was astonished. I looked over at Aunt Virginia and she appeared to be surprised, too.

The old gentleman seemed pleased with himself. He laid the Zeppelins aside and asked me what a Plate Number Block was. I said it was a block of four stamps, taken from the corner of a 50-stamp sheet that had the Plate Number of the sheet on it.

I think he knew what I was talking about, because he reached into his box again and brought out a stack of 50-stamp sheets, all U.S. Commemorative issues - the National Parks, the Army and Navy Series, and others, that had been issued back in the 1930's. I was familiar with the stamps, but I had never seen whole sheets of them before.

Dr. Young invited me to come over beside him for a closer look and he got me to explain where the Plate Numbers were located, sometimes at the top of the sheet and sometimes at the bottom.

He said, "Would you like to have some of these for your collection?" I said that I would. The next thing I knew, he was tearing the Plate Number corners out of all the sheets! Aunt Virginia was aghast. I knew she was thinking that a complete sheet was a whole lot better than a block, and he was destroying every sheet he had! Nobody said a word. I looked over at Mama and she looked very pleased. I don't remember how Margaret looked.

That might have been the last time I was in the Compton house.

The intervening years were full of activity. We lived on the corner of Stokes Lane and Stokesmont Road. Charlotte Kinnard lived in an interesting stone house down the street and Larry Copeland and John Wilson lived up at the top of Benham Avenue on Redoubt Number 1. Lucy Love lived on Hopkins, I think. The Womacks were across the street, Richard Cotten on the street behind them, and going down Stokes toward Belmont, Wally Wolf and Bunny Michel hung out. Not with each other, of course.

We had a big yard and, in summertime, kids would come from all over the neighborhood to play softball on our front lawn. Home Plate was right in front of the house, where all the windows were, and you got a home run if you hit it over Stokes Lane. Mama would serve lemonade between innings. I think some of the guys wished that she was their mother. They were the ones who came around even when I wasn't there.

But she was not without manias. One was houses. My father told me once that Mama made him build three houses and, each time, he got further in debt. Apparently, she wanted stuff that you couldn't just get out of a bin in the hardware store or the Sears Catalog. Harvey's didn't have it.

At 4317 Lealand Lane, we had glass bricks in our garage before glass bricks were cool. At that time, there were only two houses on that stretch of Lealand - ours and the house where the contractor, who had built both houses, lived. His name was Cartwright and he was the father of John and LaNeve Cartwright, whom we've heard tell about.

In the woods, behind our houses, rusting monkey cages from the old Glendale Zoo were being actively reclaimed by nature. At night, I heard strange, metal sounds.

The Stokes Lane house was very contemporary: in the living room, there was a smart-looking fireplace with no flue. The only time we ever started a fire in it was during the blizzard of '51. We were lucky we didn't get killed.

Stokes Lane had a rec room with a linoleum floor, laid out like a chessboard, which Mama had specifically designed and commissioned. It was her idea to make a set of wooden chessmen, each two feet tall, so Alex, L. D. and I could play big chess on the rec room floor. Everybody thought that was cool, but somehow the chessmen never got made.

In the dining room, there was a blond mahogany table that folded up into a perfect square, right under a light, that was recessed into the ceiling, and which cast a beam, through some special lens, in a perfectly square shape, illuminating the square, folded-up table to its exact proportions. I believe we were the only people in the neighborhood with one of those.

Another mania Mama had was for papier mache. If you knew my mother, you might argue that this was part of a more general mania she had for arts and crafts in any medium whatsoever, and you would be right. But I want to emphasize that she was a master of papier mache.

There were years when, any time you came into our living room, day or night, you would be confronted by a long table, covered with newspapers, with great vats of papier mache paste on either end. Rolls of chickenwire were stacked up in the corners. On the table, at any given time, there were several constructions in different stages of production. Paste was on everything.

She liked making animals by sculpting the bodies out of chickenwire and then covering them over with papier mache. Once, she made a big thing about four feet tall that stood on the floor. Everybody who saw it said it looked like a dang donkey. So, we started taking it to football games. It was such a hit that I suggested that she make some papier mache students, next. I was something of a wit, back then.

In those days, it seemed that we lived in a continual maelstrom. Mama's job was to keep it going. Eventually, the first three of us brothers grew up and scattered. Rick and Joel stayed behind and got caught in the sixties. Rick made it through somehow, but Joel didn't.

Actually, Daddy was the first to go. They said that he was walking up a long hill to a church for somebody else's funeral, and collapsed just before he got to the door. There's something in that image that I just can't shake.

Mama said that she would miss him, but that was about all. She didn't say much about Joel, either, in my hearing. As with her mother, she took all that inside her and left it there. I can understand that.

For the next 30 years, after we kids had all moved on, Mama lived alone. She complained about loneliness, but I think she enjoyed the peace and quiet.

She moved to a smaller house not far from Woodmont and Estes, and became absorbed in her last mania - miniatures. Miniature people in miniature houses with miniature furniture in miniature yards with miniature trees and miniature dogs.

She made little tableaux by getting rocks and sprinking artificial grass on them, here and there, and situating, with glue, the miniature people and trees and houses, here and there. But she didn't limit herself to miniatures. She drew pastels of circus clowns, framed them and hung them on the wall. She sculpted with metal rods and wire. She worked with anything that came to hand.

Over time, the house filled up with miniatures and arts and craft materials. In some rooms, there was no place to sit down. She spun the cocoon around her until it seemed there was only space, at the center, for her bed and a TV.

Eventually, her 60-year-old Camels habit began to catch up with her. She suffered several small strokes, spent some time in the hospital, and resumed her long-standing feud with her doctors. She did stop smoking.

During this time, David and Rick, as the brothers still in town, drew the duty of caring for her. David took the major role, with power of attorney, paying her bills and taking care of the house, as well as providing regular company. Rick, I think, provided an emotional connection. When she had to go to the hospital, David would come by every day, or so, as time permitted. Rick came to see her, too, on a regular basis.

David took the brunt of her dissatisfactions with the way things were going, in general. He heard about the stuff she needed that she didn't have, and the stuff she had that she didn't need.

I'm pretty sure that I would not have done as good a job, if I had been in that position. I think Billy would agree with me on that one.

Then Mama had a bigger stroke that sent her to the hospital with dim prospects of coming home again. Billy and I were called and we came to Nashville. We saw her in the hospital, unconscious and hooked up to all the machines. The doctors said there was little hope, but then, just like Johnny Cammareri's mother, she revived and demanded to be sent home.

She came home, but found that her quality of life had diminished. She had to have round-the-clock care and that meant people in the house she didn't know. Even though these caregivers were very professional and understanding with her, she complained about them until they all quit.

The only option left was a nursing home. She resisted it as long as she could, but David eventually told her that she couldn't keep living alone - even if he came by every day, it wouldn't be enough. So, begrudgingly, she went to a nursing home, but she made everybody there miserable and they evicted her.

The next time she went to a nursing home, they adjusted her drug regimen and she became placid and slept a lot. She said that she enjoyed sleeping because she had wonderful dreams.

Betty and I drove up a few times to see her. The last time we went, she was sleeping the whole time we were there. The time before that, she was awake but couldn't speak. I wondered how much she was aware of anything. The nursing home put on an entertainment, that day, with amateur groups playing instruments and singing. We wheeled Mama down with the others and saw the show. Mama didn't seem to know what was going on. After the show, we stayed with her a little longer in the waiting room. David held her hand the whole time.

When we left the nursing home, I asked Betty if she thought that Mama was aware of anything.

Betty said, "She talked to me."

I said, "When?"

"When we were in the waiting room."

"I didn't hear anything."

"She didn't actually talk - she mouthed the words to me without making any sound"

"What did she say?"

"She said: 'I'm just waiting to die.'"

I decided to drive by Compton Avenue before going back to our motel. I went where I thought it was, but it wasn't there. The house had disappeared. The hill was gone.

Later, I found out that I was looking in the wrong place. I was dumbfounded to find that Compton Avenue is right across the street from the Sterling Court Apartments, where I had my paper route.

The old house was torn down years ago. Purists may argue that the hill is still there. But it's not the hill of my memory.