He Can Do Magic
We are sitting in a Irish bar/ restaurant having lunch and my sons are getting fidgety. I have no idea that something big is coming. I’ve had Parkinson’s Disease for a few years and I’m feeling pretty good. But the outlook is discouraging and if I can’t work and I require care that devours money we may be in real trouble.
Thinking about it and not knowing is a form of slow torture. It’s scary enough that it will cripple me but that it could leave my family destitute is almost too much to bear. So I don’t. I asked my doctor once how long I had and he said no one could tell me that. One of the maddening things about this disease is that it is different for every patient, Some are ravaged quickly by dementia, others find they have trouble swallowing, which can become extremely dangerous. Three Parkinson’s patients I befriended got worse more quickly then I did and one is dead. So I guess I’m among the luckiest of the very unlucky.
But I’m not thinking about that at lunch, in fact I’m trying hard not to think of what will inevitably happen to me because there are no good outcomes, the least bad is the thing we cling to.
Then we notice our neighbor in the bar, having a beer with a friend. He lives about six blocks away and always has a great party on St. Patricks Day complete with young girls performing traditional Irish dances, an inflatable bounce house and “The Quiet Man” on the big screen TV in the huge den. We’re not very close, but friendly.
My youngest son is a magician. I know what you’re thinking, “Stinks.”
But he’s not like other kids, he practices constantly. We hear him standing in front of the full length mirror outside his bedroom making coins disappear. Sometimes they drop on the floor but he works at it. He has a video of a time at school he made a card appear in a rice krispies box in the snack machine and the other kids screaming in wonder.
He asks if he can show my neighbor a trick and when I agree he runs over to the men at the bar, who are about twice his height.
I see them greet him, look at each other with knowing smiles because they’ll have to feign surprise at his childish trick.
I hear him murmuring as he explains the trick, the men lean in, trying to find the deception. And then comes the explosive laughter and astonishment. The men laugh and slap each other on the back and splash their beers over the sides of their glasses. Watching people unashamedly astonished is a treat but that’s not why, 50 feet away, I’m smiling. They insist he take $20 but that’s not it either. If this kid has the courage to walk up to grown men in a bar and use skills he taught himself to get that reaction, then I’m certain, absolutely certain for thr first time. that he will manage without me. That this disease is my fight, not his. That come what may my family will be OK.
