Sometimes the Magic Works Read Online Free PDF Page B

who, for a variety of reasons, encouraged me in my efforts.
    My parents were always my biggest boosters, enormously supportive of my efforts, often without reason for being so beyond the generally held belief that this was what parents were supposed to do. They praised my early efforts as special and indicative of real promise, when I suspect they were quite ordinary. They indulged my passion for playing with figures and making cutouts for storyboards long after they thought that I should be out playing baseball or riding my bike. They put up with my imaginings and playacting and general strangeness as if it were all perfectly normal. When I was desperate for advice on what I needed to do to improve my writing, they managed to find a children’s book editor out of Detroit who gave me just enough encouragement to keep me going.
    Mostly, they set an example. They read books in a way that suggested right from the beginning that I should want to do so, as well—not because reading books was a requirement, but because it was a privilege. Books were the source of such happiness and contentment that there could be no better experience. I can remember watching them read, so absorbed in their books that I could sit there making faces at them and they would not notice. There were books everywhere in our home, and while some were placed high up on the shelves, out of reach of children, I was never told I couldn’t read one once I had it in my hands, even when I knew they probably weren’t always thrilled by my choice.
    My father was a story doctor for a time in the thirties, before the war, for a periodical called
Story
magazine. His job was to read and correct pieces of fiction that had been accepted for publication. He was essentially a line editor, but frequently was called upon to rewrite prose that needed help in order to make the story publishable. Often, the problem was severe enough that it was necessary for him to rewrite the story completely.
    I found out some years later that he had wanted to be a fiction writer himself. He was nearly eighty years of age when he told me this, and just beginning to reveal some of the secrets he had kept hidden from me for many years. He had tried his hand at writing fiction, but nothing had ever come of it. I asked him not long before he died why he hadn’t kept at it, and he told me, rather ruefully, that he didn’t think that his writing was good enough to have bothered.
    By then, there was some tension between us, and I think it was caused at least in part by my success. He was seeing in me something of what he could have been. He was happy for me, but a bit sad for himself, as well. Unfulfilled dreams are not easily forgotten. It made me wonder how much encouragement he had received in his writing efforts. Had there been someone there for him as he had been there for me? He had lived through the trials of the Depression and World War II. Demands had been made of him that had not been made of me. Had things been different, he might have pursued his writing more aggressively. I have read some of his work, now that he is gone. It is pretty good.
    My mother was a writer, as well, but only sporadically and always in secret. She kept a journal, and after she died my father gave it to me to read. It was the first time I knew she had written anything. It was a typical series of entries chronicling events that had been important to my mother—visits to relatives and friends, trips abroad, and observations about her life. It showed she had a way with language and an eye for detail, but it was oddly unrevealing about her as a person. I wondered why that was. She was outgoing and loved conversation. Her writing did not suggest this.
    Mostly, these writings of my parents made me wonder about my genetics, about whether my enthusiasm was in some way inherited. It seems almost impossible to believe it wasn’t.
    After my parents, teachers influenced me most. That piece of