Absolute seriousness is never without a dash of humor.
―Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The other morning I was tidying up my magic studio — organizing decks of cards, putting props in their appropriate bins, and generally procrastinating with great success. I was supposed to be writing at that hour.
Just a few minutes to straighten things out, I thought. A few minutes won’t hurt.
Then I dug into my backpack, still stuffed from a Saturday memorial service and Sunday worship service. After pulling out my laptop, iPad, notebooks, folders, and a magic bag I use to impart a lesson about inclusion, I thought I’d emptied it.
But down in the bottom, hiding in a corner, was a little stowaway: a white marble.
I use black and white marbles for a mindreading feat, a trick based on Japanese lore called Kurotsuke, or The Black Moon, and when I saw the white marble, I realized why the last time I tried to perform it I was short one. Wishing to return the errant orb to its rightful storage container, I cast about looking for the little box that originally held a roll of half dollars and that I had repurposed and lovingly labeled MARBLES.
I looked in my studio storage closet where most of my tricks are. Not there. I looked in our living room storage closet, where most of my magic supplies are. Not there. Opened about a dozen drawers. No box. In all, I spent about 20 minutes trying to find that box so I could put that one marble away.
Then it dawned on me, and I had to laugh. For I had, truly and literally, lost my marbles.
Maybe it’s because current events are go grim. Maybe it’s because I veer wildly from hope to hopelessness twenty times a day. But that little moment just cracked me up. I love when the universe serves up a joke. As a wordsmith, I especially love when the joke involves a play on words. My siblings and I all love puns, a genetic condition we inherited from our mother — a woman who once, without flinching, defined popcorn as “a salt and buttery.”
I can recall another time I lived a cliché. After my first wife and I separated, I lived in about a half dozen places, wherever I could find cheap rent or no rent so I could continue paying a mortgage and my sons wouldn’t be uprooted from their Boston suburban home. At one point I moved back to my childhood home outside Syracuse to live with my folks — not easy when you’re in your forties.
But there were teacher conferences and visitations to attend back in Massachusetts, so I found myself driving back and forth a lot, a five-to-six-hour drive. Once, after making the New York-to-Boston trek to attend a school play, I drove back the same day. Two six-hour drives in one day are a lot, and I found myself nodding off on the New York State Thruway, so I stopped at a hotel outside Albany to stay overnight.
After checking out the next morning, and still in a kind of daze, I hopped in the car and got back on the thruway, heading east the way I’d done dozens of times. After about five miles, I noticed something didn’t seem quite right. Yes, I was driving the way I so often did on auto-pilot after visiting my folks back in New York — east toward Boston. But I didn’t live there anymore. I was headed the wrong way.
So I got off at the next exit, crossed the overpass, and got back on the thruway heading west — toward Syracuse. Animal magnetism had drawn me toward my sons, and where I had lived for thirty years, but I had just been there. I needed to go the other way.
There, alone in the car, starting to feel defeated, I instead started to laugh at the folly of it all. I literally hadn’t known whether I was coming or going.
Could it be that when the chips are down and darkness descends, sometimes the gods choose that exact moment to deliver a punchline? To defuse the situation? Or might it be that we are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for? Maybe it is somewhere in between: that the angels watching over us want us to remember not to take anything, least of all ourselves, too seriously. They prod us in certain moments as if to say, c’mon, you’ve got to admit — that’s funny. And all of heaven grins. It’s a kindness. The greater forces want us to know, especially when we need to hear it most, that we’re going to be okay.
Readers, what twist of phrase have you lived? What’s your favorite pun? Put it in the comments. Let’s all groan together.
Do you suppose we do some of our best thinking while procrastinating? Did you ever find your marbles?