Do You Believe in Magic?

I believe in magic. (I believe in the Tooth Fairy too, but that’s another story.) I believe in magic the same way I believe that people are inherently decent and that eating a little chocolate every day is good for you. I believe in this because I have hope. And what is hope, really, but the belief of something better.

Maybe I’m feeling hopeful today because I’m writing from where I first fell in love with magic: the Centerville Public Library. As a child, books took me to places where dogs grew to be the size of houses and where young girls wore mismatched socks and grew up to be witches. I was six and my world included my parents and my baby sister Jackie. It was a world in which newspapers were delivered to your front door, where markets weren’t super, and where Fridays were sunny not black.

Sitting here now in this same room, in the back of the newly renovated library, (with free wifi and free coffee!) surrounded by books, the sun shining through a large bay window overlooking Four Seas Ice Cream, I realize this is not only the place where I learned to read, but where I felt hopeful about the future.

Maybe that is why many of my childhood friends have returned to Cape Cod. Because life out there, on the other side of the bridge, filled with big cities and big lights and big shots, lacks that homespun feeling. But here, in this quaint little town, remain glimpses of that past world. And it seems that now, more than ever, hope is what we could use a little more of.

I may no longer be the little girl with pigtails and scraped knees curled on a beanbag chair reading about Dorrie the Little Witch, however this room still makes me feel hopeful. And that, to me, is real magic.