April - A Kind of Magic

Every once in a while, I run across a person that seems just a bit supernatural. Someone who was paint-stroked with a kind of voodoo magic by fairies at their christening perhaps. Or touched by a good, even if slightly wild kind of magic (not malevolent, but perhaps not quite safe either). Or maybe it’s that crossroad-sold-your-soul-to-the-devil kind of magic that a person has bought for themselves at (great?) price. This magic is most easily spotted in artists; musicians, dancers, elite athletes, performance artists, actors, gardeners, and the Dali Lama.

Maybe this magic is attributed (by me) to those who’ve put thousands of hours of practice into making a thing seem effortless and beautiful.

I once fell in love for an afternoon with a guy who was a professional whistler.

There’s a magic in mastery, isn’t there?

But there’s also some who have something a little extra. Larger than life. Bigger. More full.

Is it charisma? Passion for what they’re doing? Or simply good acting? I don’t know what it is exactly but it’s enthralling (and a few of enthralling’s synonyms as well) –luring, captivating, bewitching.

This kind of something reminds me of the silly movie The Three Amigos when Ned Nederlander (played by Martin Short) is telling the story of when Dorothy Gish met him on the set of one of his films and looked him in the face and said, “Young man, you have got it.”

It’s like that. One just knows when someone has it. The magic.

My cousin and I run across such a person after a full and vacationy day together. We’ve had our morning tea and coffee in the sunshine on the front porch of her house and then in the shade on the back porch. We’ve been to the top of Sandia Peak. We’ve spent hours at the Tinkertown Museum in all its quirky wonder. We’ve lunched at a Thai restaurant and talked of childhoods, family, and the body of water we’d want to spend the rest of our lives next to if we had to choose only one. Now she’s brought me to Old Town Albuquerque with its adobe buildings and its mix of Spanish-Native-American-Mexican flair.

As a first stop, she’s taken me to see Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel which is an almost hidden gem tucked away at the end of the lane. And, after having admired and marveled, we’re walking back towards the center of town.

Like smoke, like stage fog, the music comes straight out of the air at me. It’s like the compelling call of the Pied Piper’s pipe. I have to listen. I have to follow. I have to find the source. It’s something like jazz or blues or sweet rock ‘n roll. I don’t know exactly what it is. It’s nothing I’ve heard before and everything I’ve ever heard. A powerful guitar, a voice that sings straight from the center of the earth, from the dirt, the rocks, the trees, the not quite stable elements.

The artist himself is a dressed in blacks and greys. His long hair, maybe dreadlocked, maybe not (I’m trying not to stare too loudly like an untraveled tourist) caresses his face at the instigation of the afternoon wind. His eyes are lit like the core of the earth. His mouth—that sound comes from him—is wide, his teeth perfect. He holds nothing back. He’s singing with his whole being; face, eyes, mouth, fingers, body, guitar.

Just in front of him, my cousin and I stop to listen. I’m caught in the spell and I don’t want the magic to fade. Let this music never end. While he shifts from one song to another, I slip a dollar in his open guitar case, slip it under a weighted thing so the wind won’t carry it off. After another couple has dropped some coins in the case, my cousin takes a ring from her finger and leaves it as an offering.

We walk away because to stand there forever feels awkward. How would you handle a meeting with a god if you encountered one?

“Thank you,” he calls after us as we keep on down the street. He says it in between the words of his song. I turn and smile. His song follows us.

“We can come back,” my cousin says, “and hear more if he’s still there after we’ve seen a little more.”

“Sure,” I say. Then as an understatement, I add, “He’s really good.”

Around the corner, we pause in front of San Felipe De Neri, the main church of Old Town Albuquerque. I snap a couple pictures. We pass the square. I can no longer hear the strumming rhythm of the guitar. Old Town has its history and I know nothing of it. But I can feel the old conquistador varnish on the ground. The Spanish flair. I’ve felt it in Peru. I’ve recognized it at its source a little in Spain. Now here.

My cousin and I wander into the candy store. We get ice cream and eat it as we walk by a pair of musicians playing panpipes. We circle the last of the shops without going inside any of them.

Eventually, maybe pulled by the same call, we drift back and sit on convenient city benches across the street from the magician-musician. He’s still there. He’s still playing.  

“There’s something about him,” I say, or words like that, to my cousin. “I could write a story about him. He has this voodoo magic.” That’s as close as I can come to describing it. It’s not exactly correct, but it’s as close as I can get in the moment.

“These are his songs, aren’t they?” she asks. But it’s also not a question. They have to be. They feel of his soul. If they didn’t come from him, he got his magic at some crossroad. At a fae-blessed christening.

He sees us across the way, he smiles at us when we clap at the end of one of his songs.

I want to look him in the face and say, “Young man, you have got it.” But I’m not Dorothy Gish.

Years from now, a day from now, yesterday, tomorrow, I could write a story about him. Not him really, for I don’t actually know him, but a him that he inspires with his art. As we’d talked about him from across the street, talked about him in front of him, but out of ear shot, my cousin had said, “It’s so easy to make up a narrative about him.” Adding something to the effect of, “But it’s not true.” Or “It wouldn’t be true.” Or “It might not be true.”

She’s right (no matter what she actually said that I’ve misremembered). It’s not true and it also is. For magic shape shifts things. Magic creates.  

Inspired by something (doesn’t inspired mean “God breathed”?) in the listening, I want to turn his magic into my own. Not to possess it. Certainly not to possess him. Or anything that is his. But to carry that magic on, to not let it wisp away, to pass it on to someone else. Isn’t that the beauty of creation?

My cousin and I get back in her car. She drives us around and out of Old Town. As she makes a turn, she says, “I still want to go back and get his card.”

I smile. I want to write him into a story. Maybe my cousin wants to be in love with him for an afternoon. I don’t ask. All I know is that his voodoo magic was strong.