Into the Magic Shop Read online

  “I’m glad you came back today.” Ruth smiled at me, and I felt a little less jittery. “How do you feel?”

  “OK.”

  “What are you feeling right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “No,” I lied.

  Ruth put her hand on my right knee and pressed down. My knee immediately stopped moving. I braced myself, ready to run if this got any weirder. She took her hand off my knee.

  “You were shaking your leg like you were nervous.”

  “I guess I’m just wondering what you’re going to teach me.”

  “The magic I’m going to teach you is not something you can buy in a store. This magic has been around for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years and you can learn it only if somebody teaches it to you.”

  I nodded my head.

  “But you have to give me something first.”

  I was pretty sure I would have given Ruth anything to learn her secrets, but other than my bike I didn’t have much.

  “What do you want?”

  “You need to promise me that you will teach someone else what I’m teaching you this summer. And you have to get that person to promise they will teach someone. And so on. Can you do that?”

  I had absolutely no idea who I would teach, and at that point I didn’t even know whether I could teach it to someone else. But Ruth was just staring at me, waiting for an answer, and I knew there was only one right answer.

  “I promise.”

  I thought about crossing my fingers behind my back just in case I couldn’t find anyone to teach, but instead raised three fingers up in the air like I had seen the Boy Scouts do. I figured that made it official.

  “Close your eyes. I want you to imagine you are a leaf blowing in the wind.”

  I opened my eyes and grimaced. I was really tall for my age but only about 120 pounds. I was more like a twig stuck in the ground than a leaf blowing in the wind.

  “Close your eyes,” she said kindly, and nodded.

  I closed my eyes again and tried to imagine a leaf blowing in the wind. Maybe she was going to hypnotize me into thinking I was a leaf. I had seen a stage hypnotist before, and he had made people from the audience think they were different farm animals. Then he had them all start fighting with each other. I started laughing and opened my eyes.

  Ruth sat upright in the chair across from me, her hands resting palms-down on her thighs. She sighed a little.

  “Jim, the first trick is to learn how to relax every muscle in your body. It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

  I wasn’t sure I ever felt relaxed. It seemed like I was always ready to either run or fight. I opened my eyes again, and Ruth tilted her head to the right and looked straight into my eyes.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to help you. Can you trust me?”

  I thought about what she was asking. I didn’t know if I trusted anyone in my life, certainly not adults. But no one had ever asked me to trust them before, and I liked the way it felt. I wanted to trust Ruth. I wanted to learn what she had to teach me, but the whole situation felt so weird.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why are you going to help me?”

  “Because the second we met I knew you had potential. I see it. And I want to teach you to see it too.”

  I didn’t know what potential was or how she knew I had it. I also didn’t know then that she probably would have seen potential in anyone who had strolled into the magic shop on that summer day in 1968.

  “OK,” I said. “I trust you.”

  “Good, then. That’s where we will begin. Focus on your body right now. How does it feel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about riding your bike. What does it feel like in your body when you ride your bike really fast?”

  “It feels good, I guess.”

  “What is your heart doing right now?”

  “Beating,” I said, and smiled.

  “Slow or fast?”

  “Fast.”

  “Good. How do your hands feel?”

  I looked down and noticed my hands were gripping on to the edge of the chair. I relaxed them.

  “They’re relaxed.”

  “OK. What about your breathing? Is it deep or shallow?” Ruth took a deep breath in and out. “Like this or like this?” She started breathing fast, like a panting dog.

  “I guess it’s somewhere in between.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Your leg is shaking again.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “The body is full of signs about what’s going on inside us. It’s really amazing. Someone can ask you how you are feeling and you might say, ‘I don’t know,’ because maybe you don’t know or maybe you don’t want to say, but your body always knows how you are feeling. When you are afraid. When you are happy. When you are excited. When you are nervous. When you are angry. When you are jealous. When you are sad. Your mind might think you do not know, but if you ask your body, it will tell you. It has a mind of its own, in a way. It reacts. It responds. Sometimes it reacts the right way in a situation, sometimes the wrong way. Do you understand?” I suddenly thought about how that was true. When I would come home, I could tell immediately what mood my mother was in as soon as I walked in the door. She didn’t have to say a word. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach.

  I shrugged. I was trying to follow what she was saying.

  “Do you ever get really sad or really angry?”

  “Sometimes.” I was angry a lot, but I didn’t want to say so.

  “I want you to tell me about an instance when you were angry or afraid—and then we’re going to talk about how it feels in your body when you tell me about it.”

  My mind started racing. I didn’t know what to tell her. Should I tell her about the time I went to Catholic school and the nun slapped me and, without thinking, I slapped her back? Or maybe about Thursday night when my dad came home drunk again? Or I could tell her about what that doctor said when I took my mother to the hospital and how it made me want to hit him or crawl into a hole or both.

  “Jim, your thoughts are so loud I can hear them, but I can’t make them out. Tell me what you’re thinking right at this very moment.”

  “I’m thinking about all the things I don’t want to tell you.”

  She smiled. “It’s OK. There’s nothing you can say that would be wrong. We’re talking about what you felt. Feelings are not right or wrong. They are just feelings.”

  I didn’t really believe what she was saying. I felt an enormous amount of shame about my feelings, my anger, my sadness, all the ways my emotions seemed to take me over. I wanted to run away.

  “Your leg is going up and down a mile a minute right now,” she said. “I’m going to count to three, and I just want you to start telling me a story. You’re not going to think about what you’re going to say, OK? I’m going to count to three. Ready?”

  I was still frantically trying to clear away all of my erupting thoughts and feelings to find something that was not so embarrassing. I didn’t want to scare her away.

  “One . . .”

  What if she were Catholic and would be horrified to hear I slapped a nun and was kicked out of school and sent away to live with my older sister and her husband, where I also got in a fight and got kicked out of that school? What if she didn’t want me to come back because I was too violent?

  “Two . . .”

  What if I told her about how mad I was at my dad for getting drunk and wrecking our car, and now we had to drive around with the entire front end dented in and the bumper held on with rope and it was like a big sign that said look how poor we are, we can’t even afford to get our car fixed? What if she thinks I am a bad son?

  “Three . . .
Go!”

  “My dad drinks. Not every day, but a lot. He will go drinking and disappear sometimes for weeks, and we will be left without any money except for the public assistance checks we get, and they don’t cover too much. When he’s not drinking, we are all tiptoeing around the house trying not to set him off. When he does drink at home he yells and swears and breaks things, and my mom starts to cry. My brother disappears when this happens, and I hide out in my room, but I am always listening in case things get really bad and I need to do something. I worry about my mom. She’s sick a lot and in bed almost all the time, and she always seems to get worse after he drinks, and they fight. She yells at him when he’s home, and then when he leaves she goes silent. She doesn’t get out of bed or eat or do anything. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Go on, Jim.” She was really listening. She really seemed to want to hear what I was saying. She didn’t look like she was shocked. She was smiling that chocolate chip cookie smile of understanding. Like she knew what I was talking about or at least she didn’t think my family was dirt because we were so poor. “Go on,” she said, encouraging me.

  “One time I came home from school and everything was quiet. A weird kind of quiet. I went in my mom’s room, and she was in bed. She had taken a bunch of pills. They’re pills to calm her down, but she took too many. I had to run to the apartment next door and ask the lady there to drive us to the hospital. She’s had to go to the hospital before like this. My mom, I mean—she’s done this kind of thing before. At the hospital my mom is in the bed, and I’m sitting next to her, and I can hear them talking on the other side of the curtain. One guy is so mad that they have to do all this paperwork for my mom, and he says she’s been here before, and he’s tired of wasting time on these types of people. The woman laughs and says something about ‘maybe this will be the last time.’ I can’t really make it out and then they both laugh, and I am so mad I just want to tear down the curtain and scream at them. People in a hospital shouldn’t be like that. And I’m mad at my mom, because I don’t understand why she has to do this. It’s not fair and it’s embarrassing, and I’m mad at my dad for making her so angry and so sad. I’m angry at both of them and everyone at the hospital and I get really, really, mad sometimes.”

  I’m not sure what to do now that I’ve stopped talking. Ruth is sitting across from me in her chair, and I just stare down at the stupid hole in my stupid tennis shoe.

  “Jim.” Ruth says my name softly. “How do you feel in your body right at this very moment?”

  I shrug my shoulders. I wonder what she thinks of me now that she knows about my family.

  “How does your stomach feel?”

  “Kind of sick.”

  “How does your chest feel?”

  “Tight. It hurts a little.”

  “What about your head?”

  “My head is pounding.”

  “How about your eyes?”

  I don’t know why, but the minute she asked that question I felt like all I wanted to do was close my eyes and cry. I wasn’t going to cry. I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t help it. A tear rolled down my check.

  “My eyes are stinging a bit, I guess.”

  “Thank you for telling me about your parents, Jim. Sometimes we need to stop thinking about what we should say and just say what it is we need to.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  Ruth and I both laughed and in that second I felt a little better.

  “My chest doesn’t feel as tight.”

  “Good. That’s good. I’m going to teach you how to relax every muscle in your body and I want you to practice this every day for an hour. Everything we practice here every morning I want you to also practice at home at night, sort of like homework. Now, relaxing may sound easy, but it’s actually very, very hard to do, and it takes a lot of practice.”

  I still wasn’t sure I could remember a time when I felt relaxed. I’ve felt tired plenty of times, but I don’t know if I’ve ever felt relaxed. I wasn’t even sure what it meant.

  Ruth told me to sit in the chair in a comfortable position and close my eyes. She asked me again to imagine I was a leaf blowing in the wind. It felt kind of cool to soar around the streets in my head. I felt a little lighter in the chair.

  “Don’t slouch. You want to stay awake and you want to keep your muscles engaged even though you’re going to be relaxing them. Take a deep breath in and then let it out. Three times. Inhale through your nose and blow out through your mouth.”

  I breathed as deeply as I could. Three times.

  “Now I want you to focus on your toes. In your mind, think about your toes. Feel your toes. Wiggle them around a little. Curl them up in your shoes and then relax them. Take a deep breath in, and then out again slowly. Just keep breathing and focusing on your toes. Feel them getting heavier and heavier.”

  I took some more deep breaths in and out and tried to focus on my toes. You would think that would be easy, but it wasn’t. I wiggled them around a little in my shoes, but then I started wondering if I would get new shoes before school started, and I started to think about not having money and I forgot all about my toes.

  It seemed like Ruth knew every time I started thinking about something other than my toes because each time my mind wandered off to anything other than my toes she would interrupt at that exact moment and tell me to take a deep breath again. I can’t tell you how long I had to breathe and think about my toes, but it seemed like forever.

  “Now I want you to take a deep breath and focus on your feet.”

  I was getting hungry. I was getting bored. What did my feet have to do with learning magic? It was probably getting close to lunch. Maybe she was going to starve me to death. She must have been reading my mind because I swear she knew exactly when to interrupt me.

  “Bring your mind back to your feet.”

  I rotated my ankles and thought about my big, stupid, hungry feet.

  “Now think about your ankles. Your knees. Relax your thighs. Feel your legs getting heavy and dropping into the chair.”

  I imagined I was the fattest man in the world and that the chair would get so heavy it would drop through the shag carpet and end up in China.

  “Now relax the muscles in your stomach. Tighten them and then relax them.” I did as she said only to have my stomach growl so loud I was sure she could hear it.

  “Now your chest, Jim. Take a deep breath in and out and relax your chest. Feel your heart beating and relax the muscles around your heart. Your heart is a muscle, pumping blood and oxygen through the body. You can relax it like any other muscle.” I wondered if I relaxed my heart whether my body would just stop working. What would Ruth do then?

  “Focus on the center of your chest. Feel the muscles of your chest relaxing. Take a deep breath in and feel your heart beating as you relax further. Now breathe out and again focus on relaxing the muscles of your chest.” I noticed as I did the exercise my heart was no longer racing.

  In medical school I would study the heart. I would learn that there are nerves that connect the heart to that part of the brainstem called the medulla oblongata via the vagus nerve, how the vagus nerve had two components, and how if you increased the output of the nerve by relaxing and slowing the breath, it would stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, slowing your heart and decreasing your blood pressure. I also learned how decreasing the tone of the vagus nerve actually stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, which is what happens if you are scared or frightened—your heartbeat increases. But in the magic shop that day all I knew was that when Ruth was teaching me how to relax and breathe I felt a little better, a little calmer. I didn’t know about the nervous system and the myriad ways the brain and heart communicate. Neither my brain nor my heart needed to study anything in order for it to work. I was sending signals from my brain to my heart, and my heart was responding.

 
“Now I want you to relax your shoulders. Your neck. Your jaw. Let your tongue drop to the bottom of your mouth. Feel your eyes and your forehead tighten and relax. Let everything, every muscle in your body . . . just . . . relax.”

  Ruth didn’t say anything else for what seemed like forever. I sat there trying to relax, trying to breathe slowly in and out. Trying not to fidget. I could hear her taking in deep breaths and blowing them out, and I took this as a signal I should do the same. It’s hard to breathe when you’re thinking about how you should breathe. Once or twice I tried to peek out at Ruth through squinted eyes, and I could see she had her own eyes closed and was mirroring my position in the chair. Finally she spoke.

  “OK. Time is up. Open your eyes.”

  I opened my eyes and sat up in the chair. My body did feel different and a little strange.

  “That’s it, Jim. I bet you could use a snack.” She pulled open a drawer in the desk and pulled out a bag of Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies and said, “Take as many as you want.” I took a handful. They were my favorite. Then she looked at me over the rim of her glasses that she had put on and said, “You’re on your way.”

  I didn’t really know what I was on my way to. I wasn’t sure what was really magic about just sitting in a chair for an hour.

  “Jim, I want you to practice relaxing your body. Especially in situations with your family, like you told me about. You can stay relaxed even when you’re feeling angry or sad. I know it seems like a lot of work, but eventually you’ll be able to get into a state of total relaxation almost instantaneously. It’s a great trick to learn. Trust me on this.”

  “OK. But can I ask why?”

  “There are a lot of things in life we can’t control. It’s hard, especially when you’re a child, to feel like you have control over anything. Like you can change anything. But you can control your body and you can control your mind. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s very powerful. It can change everything.”

  “I don’t know.”