Magic Among the Mundane

I can’t be sure that the first thing I remember ever really happened or whether it was a dream, a story someone told me, or something I made up later in life. I was very young, standing somewhere in my home town in suburban New Jersey looking through the space between two little row houses. I don’t remember much detail; the houses were likely the humble two- or three-story, neatly kept and well-maintained affairs that lined the avenues of my childhood. Small manicured lawns with matching shrubs, a driveway beside each, maybe a small garage that housed an affordable, sensible car. Maybe an old cat sat upon a wooden fence post or was curled up in a ball upon a porch. Maybe a dog barked from some backyard nearby.

In my memory of this ordinary scene, something extraordinary then appeared. As I watched, I saw a figure on horseback, appearing ghostly to me in the haze and distance, move slowly down the street, passing through the space between the two houses. I remember that he wore the clothes of another time: a tri-cornered hat, brown knee-high leather boots, and a red or blue coat with gold buttons. I heard the clip clopping of horse hooves on the pavement until they vanished with this vision as it passed behind the house.

Thinking back now, I try to make sense of this strange apparition. Was I seeing a ghost? Was this just my imagination run wild? Or could this man have existed in the real world? One fact of my childhood makes me believe that it is possible this was real. In 1976, two years after I was born, many small towns across the country celebrated America’s bi-centennial anniversary with fireworks, picnics, and colonial re-enactments. This figure may indeed have been real, may have been our town’s mayor, a high school teacher, or an actor hired to set a certain mood for the day by riding down the street on horseback dressed as General Washington or some other figure from 1776.

This simple, historical fact may indeed explain away the mystery of the ghostly man on horseback. It might help me now to make rational sense of what mystified me as a child, but it does nothing to undo the sense of wonder it inspired in me then, a sense that has remained with me through all the years since. Growing up in what I remember as an uninspiring landscape filled with strip malls and highways dotted with neon signs screaming messages of crass commercialism, I looked everywhere for something more magical and mysterious to appear. Maybe this momentary vision that I encountered as a child created that hunger within me during my earliest, most formative days. Because I had seen something so strange and unexpected—a man that appeared impossibly out of a long-ago time and went walking down that common, simple street—I came to believe that, at any time, magic might appear again among the mundane, if only I knew where and how to look.