Magic Moments

In the early 1970’s I was what many would’ve called a “latchkey” kid. After school, having the whole house to myself, I often would come home and plop down in front of the TV, waiting for my mom to get home from work in the evening. During that period, the popular TV show “The Brady Bunch” was running on one of our local TV stations, and it was on one ordinary school day afternoon while laying on my stomach on the floor with my chin propped in the palms of my hands in front the TV screen that “The Brady Bunch” became what I’ve come to consider my introduction to what true magic really is. It was just a brief moment, something that lasted perhaps all of two to three seconds, but it was something that happened that my mind returned to many many times throughout my childhood, trying to fathom how I’d seen what I had, too worried about what anyone might think or say to me if I dared to actually describe what I had seen, and to ask how what I saw could be possible. There was no possible explanation to my mind, so I kept that experience to myself for over forty years. Then one day, while driving down a sunny rural highway on my commute home from my job as Senior Editor at a film/video production company that that moment involving the big living room TV console of my childhood snapped into my consciousness, and in the blink of an eye I immediately knew everything that had created what was one of the most magical moments of my childhood. 

The TV had just run a series of commercials, the usual break in the show that forced me to hear how white this toothpaste would make my teeth, or how the scent of that perfume would make my mom irresistible to the world, or maybe presented me with a preview of next Saturday’s morning cartoon lineup. When the usual batch of commercials came to an end and the commercials’ fade to black faded up on the familiar exterior of the Brady household seen in wide shot from across their street and the incidental music introduced the scene, suddenly a giant human head rose up in the sky above and behind the roof of the Brady house. Compared to the house, this man’s head would’ve been about the size of half the house, or of the garage and the kitchen combined. It had a puffy, thick covering of curly ‘70s hair (much like the painter Bob Ross’). The giant head looked around quickly, seemed suddenly very startled, and then darted back behind the house, disappearing. The show immediately cut to the next shot of whatever family drama of that episode was unfolding inside, and everything went on as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. Laying there alone in my house in front of the TV that moment around the age of seven or so, I distinctly recall the sensation of my stomach falling out from under me and my arms and legs suddenly tingling intensely. Was I the only one who just saw that??? What just happened? I’d watched “The Brady Bunch” for quite some time leading up to that moment that day, and this did not compute. I bolted upright and tried to imagine how what I had just seen was possible. I hadn’t imagined it, but my mind couldn’t fathom how I’d seen what I had just seen, and what it meant. Had someone accidentally filmed a giant that day when they were making “The Brady Bunch” and I somehow missed that news? Were giants a thing that I’d somehow never been taught about in school? Surely not, as that would’ve definitely been a far more interesting topic than the vast majority of the stuff they were teaching us each day as we all watched that clock waiting for three p.m. to arrive. 

In my car driving home some forty-plus years later that sunny afternoon, I was struck suddenly by how clear and blue the sky I was admiring was above the trees as I drove down the highway through the countryside. It occurred to me that that sky was so saturated a shade of solid blue that it would’ve made a perfect chroma-key color to superimpose something into in my own daily video work. Any giant object in the skyline, perhaps partially covered by the contours of the top of the tree line, could look as natural there as a drifting cloud, or the sun itself, given the benefit of a bit of video post production equipment and the equipment which to view it (ie: a TV set). In the next instant it dawned on me exactly what it was I had seen that memorable day in the early 1970’s that had made me question all of reality, the possible, and when to speak up and ask questions and when to quietly mull over what’s actually possible alone with my thoughts. 

Having spent the last two semesters of my senior year of college interning at a network- affiliated TV station located in the very same city that the syndicated “Brady Bunch” broadcast had originated from when I was a kid, it was instantly clear what it was that I had seen that I’d long ago attributed to the realm of the magical. With a green screen always at the ready on set for local network affiliates to broadcast their nightly weather forecast while a meteorologist stood superimposed live over assorted maps and backgrounds, how easy would it have been for any studio engineer to have tapped a button and combined the prerecorded network feed of that “Brady Bunch” episode - with its perfect blue sky over the Brady home - with someone setting up things in the studio for the upcoming 5:30 local news? Perhaps some interns left alone in the studio had even planned that little three second magic show and executed it perfectly without ever having been caught. Whatever the explanation, the execution had been nothing shy of the proof of the existence of a true magical experience to a seven year-old kid who was watching alone at home in his living room that afternoon. 

Driving in my car with this realization running through my mind, I immediately began to ask myself how I might react if some other, completely inexplicable event were to suddenly occur at any moment of my adult life; any kind of experience that completely defied logic and reason and yet had been clearly viewed with my own eyes. Would I be the kind of person who would immediately short circuit, flip out, melt down, or scream and yell at the inexplicability of what my own eyes had just seen, or would I be a person who accepts that everything happens for a reason, regardless of whether we are able to comprehend that reason in the moment, and just accept it and continue in a (relatively) steady state and proceed with whatever next step would be appropriate and trust that world inherently holds more than I can possibly understand? 

I genuinely wanted then to believe (and in in the many years since) that I’m a person who accepts that there is a great deal of “magic” in the world that goes on each and every minute of every day, on an infinite array of scales from the minuscule to grand, and that our minds will never be omniscient enough to comprehend it all. I’ve watched the rise in popularity of television shows in recent years in which very skilled magicians have gone to great lengths to infiltrate individuals’ lives (with the help of complicit coworkers or family members) to introduce moments of inexplicable experience into their lives, awaiting what their response to the unexplainable will be. In these shows it’s exceedingly rare to ever see an individual NOT panic, short circuit, melt down, and start yelling and screaming at the impossibility of it all, and that consistently makes me sad. I’m genuinely saddened by the fact that the magical seems to have become something that provokes fear in people, rather than pause for wonderment, or marvel at the sudden break in the predictability of daily events. I’d like to believe that there are actually a great many people who pause and assess those magical moments that occur in these shows and decide that it’s a wonderful gift to have experienced something inexplicable and magical, and trust (as long as there was no threat of harm to anyone) that these experiences are a reminder of what it means to be human, to be humble, and to accept that the universe is vast and that brilliant minds will continue to explore the world around us for as long as humans will continue to exist and will never truly know everything there is to know, and to believe that perhaps ultimately anything might actually be possible under the right conditions. Without this belief, we would stop questioning altogether, and discovery and progress would cease to occur.  And after all, isn’t the meaning of life itself to marvel at the seemingly “magical” world that exists all around us?