Thoughts on a Childhood Obsession
For a year in middle school, dad came home almost every night to the words, "Choose a card, any card!" Some perfunctory flourishes, whispers of magical words that sounded much too similar to Harry Potter spells, and voila! His card would somehow emerge at the top of the deck, under the table, in my mouth, in his mouth (just kidding, I wish). Dad had that knowing smile I recognized all too well—maybe he watches YouTube too.
This started in middle school, when I begged mom for a special magician's playing cards deck. They were tapered ever so slightly on one end, so that flipping any card would allow my fingertips to easily detect the "hidden" card. Piece of cake. I think I was going through a period of party trick education, because just before magician baby me, there was the YouTube-educated dancer practitioner. Indelible scenes of myself in the bathroom mirror flood my mind; I can picture that stupid goofy grin on my face when a move finally made sense—it's the same grin I had whenever I fooled my father with a trick. As magic entered my life, YouTube recommendations of "How to do the wave, How to pop, How to tut," were replaced by "False shuffles, Double lifts, Card flourishes."
The first step to mastery is feeling control. For cardistry, that first step was an in-hand riffle shuffle, followed immediately by the half bridge. The requirements were stringent: cards must perfectly fold into each other, one after the next, and that wasn't enough. You couldn't crudely push the cards in together; they had to spring into motion, forming a squared set with uniform sound. The goal wasn't function, it was craft—like leaves that collude to fall at the same time.
Formally, it was sleight of hand. Technically, it was just a lot of practice. Officially, it was a waste of time. But somewhere between a middle schooler’s boredom and the aesthetics of card handling was romance and art. For those briefest moments of ethereal pleasure, I watched cards appear and disappear into decks that I had complete control over. Nowadays, when I re-perform these tricks, I think of those Harry Potter incantations I was so fond of announcing. The real magic is that they were all created by muggles.