Magic Medicine

  When their child was six years old, Charlotte and Don spent a month in Histon Head, South Carolina. They drove there in their 1958 two-tone green Cadillac that looked like a tank, had plastic seat covers shot through with silver, and got about 9 inches to the gallon. They made the trip over several days, stopping in some town Charlotte no longer remembers except for the Mexican restaurant they found the next morning, which served a breakfast so big they all needed a 15-minute nap in the car before resuming the driving. It was delicious.

  Later that day they stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina and wandered into a glass shop where the owner was also the artist. The shop was filled with artful displays of watery colored glass assembled into spiders ranging in size to fit in the palm of a child’s hand on up to gigantic things that hung from the ceiling and looked like something out of the scariest science fiction story you could imagine about earth being attacked by Spiders From Space.

  Each roughly round body had the look of hard candies or bits of beach glass that might have been somewhere in the cycle of being tossed back and forth in a wild surf. Some had that faded green or blue not-yet-polished look, some looked prehistoric with their ridges and crevices, some gleamed. All of them seemed to be changing, not diminishing but changing from thing to another.

  Charlotte has forgotten the owner’s name but not the name of the shop – Charlotte’s Web. The artist loved spiders, loved that she lived in Charlotte – Sha-lot, she called it with that southern lilt – and had made her life’s work to create the creatures she made by hand-wrapping wire around the spider body of glass.

  Anyone named Charlotte or something close to it got a free spider when they visited the shop. Not only did Charlotte get one, so did their little boy named Charlie. “Each spider,” the artist told them, “has secret magic for you to discover.”

  Charlie, at six, was young enough to believe in that kind of magic. The secrets in their little family were all loving ones, like the Magic Medicine that they gave him any time he had a childhood sniffle or upset tummy, helping him on the way to recovery. It was a drink they made for him, given at bedtime, to help him sleep and get well – just warm milk with a little cinnamon mixed in - never revealing what made it magic. Charlotte, however, added a little note in the file she has carefully prepared for him to dip into only when she dies, a note that reveals that the real secret ingredient in magic medicine is love. 

  Someday he’ll find that note from her. In the present, Don was already sick with the dreadful malignant melanoma that would seize his life a few months later although it hadn’t yet been diagnosed. That would happen on the Friday after they got home.

  Don was in a lot of pain on that trip and couldn’t always conceal it. Despite that, they were trying their best to be as normal as possible and wrap their child in a month of memorable adventures. One of the best was Charlie learning how to ride a bike without training wheels; “Daddy, daddy, daddy, don’t let go of the bike, ”  he screamed, pleading with his patient father even as he left him yards behind, unaware he was sailing on his own.

  Charlotte and Don didn’t really talk about what was happening; they didn’t know, yet, although there had been foreshadowing. The night before they left on their trip, they had been at a Fourth of July party hosted by a friend whose apartment overlooked Manhattan’s Gramercy Park.  As the fireworks were about to start, everyone trooped down to the Park, available only to people who lived around it who all had keys to the wrought iron gate. Champagne bottles and flutes were carried down in gaily decorated picnic hampers. Twice Don’s glass slipped out of his fingers to shatter on the ground. He simply lost his grip.

   Charlotte did have to insist that Don call his doctor in New York when she and Charlie came back from a beach walk one day and found him pounding the arms of his beach chair with his fists, near tears from the pain. The doctor called in a prescription to a local pharmacy and the relief allowed him to drive home a few days later. Charlotte couldn’t even help with that because, having grown up in New York City, she had never needed a driver’s license.  

  They saw the doctor as soon as they got back, and the surgery was scheduled. Charlotte’s parents were on vacation in Italy, so she waited at the hospital alone, having sent Charlie off for the day with is older sister, Charlotte’s bonus daughter from her husband’s first marriage. None of them expected anything except that the evil causing the pain in his body would be identified and removed and they would go back to being a charmed family. 

  That day, in the hospital, before he scampered off with his sister, Charlie handed Charlotte his glass spider. He wanted Daddy to keep it until he was better, he said, because his father’s name didn’t let him have a spider of his own.  Charlie wanted to lend him the magic. 

  Later, she looked at the signs of danger along the way that should have let them know that the symptoms and the pain were more than just a pinched nerve or some other back issue.  So little was known, then, about this disease, though, that no one could be faulted for not being more aggressive about figuring it out. 

  But, at the beginning, they couldn’t have known that this was beyond the scope of any medicine, magic or otherwise. Charlie seemed to have forgotten about the magic as the illness progressed. Charlie and Charlotte spent that Christmas break in Florida with family. One day, walking along the beach, collecting shells and beach glass, Charlie asked,  “Mommy, do you think Daddy has a job in heaven?” Unprepared for such a question Charlotte said “I don’t know. What do you think?” “I think he does. I think he has a good one. I think he puts the designs in clouds.”

 Magic to have a child with thoughts like those.