Do you believe in magic?

I just had to post this:

Do you believe in magic?

A daughter’s quest for life direction… and magic tricks

By Franki Rudnesky

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” my dad says to my mom and I, as we both stare at him with puzzled expressions. I roll my eyes and laugh; I’ve gotten this reply many times through the years.

My dad is many things: a retired principal, a published author, a college professor; but before that he was a bank teller, a radio show host, a dairy worker, a substitute teacher, a magician.

It’s a Sunday morning and we’re sitting in Ruby’s Diner, a "50s" inspired diner and burger joint in Ardmore, PA, and I just got done asking him whether he’d be willing to teach me a magic trick, to which he promptly ripped up the straw wrapper in front of him and crumbled the pieces up in his hands.

“Sometimes you think your life is in pieces,” he said, rolling the ripped paper between his hands for my mom and  I to see, “but when you look at other people’s barriers you realize that you can easily put things back together.”

As he said this last sentence, he blew on his cupped hands and opened them to reveal the straw wrapper pristine and fully intact, to my mom’s and my own surprise.

“Stop making a mess,” my mom said, laughing and taking the wrapper from him.

“How’d you do that?” I asked, always mystified by the little sparks of magic that my dad managed to bring into everyday life, to which he replied with his classic line about magicians’ refusal to reveal their secrets.

      “He had it in his hand the whole time,” my mom said, her cynicism shining through.

      Thinking about the way that my dad meshed a simple magic trick with a life lesson, though, opened my eyes to the fact that maybe I wasn’t only trying to learn a magic trick from my dad; maybe I was just looking for some advice to make my own “magic.”