Magic

I have always been in love with magic.  There's just so much of it to love.  And just when I think I know all of magic's secrets, there's more magic to distract me!  Today had a good dose of magic in it, and I am still awestruck.

When I was very young, my sister had a little pink record player.  It could only play 45s, as I remember, and she had a few of them.  My favorite was Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town."  I would listen to it over and over when my sister wasn't around, but it wasn't just the song or Ricky's voice that put a spell on me.  It was the record player.  A small mesh screen at the base of the machine seemed to be the place from which the music emerged, and I stared at the tiny lights that flickered inside.  It was surely magic that shrunk Ricky Nelson to a size so small that he could fit inside that little room and sing to me.

A couple of years later, I was the proud owner of a transistor radio.  It was much smaller than the record player, a chunky little rectangle housed in a brown leather case, maybe 4" x 6".  During the day, I could listen to Cousin Brucie and the Top 40 hits, but very late at night, I could hear Chicago!  No, not the band, the CITY of Chicago!  That magic little radio could pull in a signal from a world away!  I liked to take the radio out of its case, pry open the back, and stare at those little transistors, color-coded in some secret configuration of magic.

And as I grew older, the magic continued.  I was the proud owner of a stereo hi-fi with a drop-down turntable, a very large Panasonic 8-track player/recorder, several small cassette boomboxes, and eventually, a massive stereo system with speakers that could double as end tables.  And then, as steadily as all of this equipment had grown larger and larger, it began to get smaller and smaller, until thousands and thousands of record albums could be contained in one tiny little iPod.  Magic?  No doubt about it.

On a whim today, I moved my nearly twenty-year-old Bose Acoustic Wave Sound System to another part of the house and enclosed its rather dated visage into a corner cabinet.  I also found and attached to it a rather serpentine flexible antenna with tentacles and threaded them upward toward the ceiling.  Pushed the power button and . . . you guessed it:  MAGIC!  Incredible sound is filling up my house, my afternoon, and my heart! 

I'm smart enough that I could probably find a book on the electronic reproduction of sound and perhaps get a general understanding of how these little boxes can fill my home with music, but I think I will continue to credit magic.  Magic is just so much easier to love than wires and transformers.