The Magic Piano

Years ago I owned, with my law partner and my brother, a cabin in the woods at Lake Arrowhead near Los Angeles.  One of our first purchases was a player piano.  Put in a roll and the keys would dance and the music played.

One day Kevin, the four year old son of my law partner, visited our cabin for the first time.  I started a piano roll for him.

As soon as the music began Kevin’s eyes grew wide.  He heard the piano playing, looked at the white and black keys racing wildly up and down, and said to me, “A magic piano.  The kids at school are never going to believe this!”

I have experienced many moments of magic in my life — moments as simple as taking a deep breath of pine-scented air in a quiet forest, or leaving my office with a profound sigh at the end of a productive day.  Moments as stirring as an evening on Broadway when Bernadette Peters sang “Send In the Clowns” directly to me.  Moments as special as seeing my first daughter carried from the delivery room, or seeing my youngest daughter married recently on a hillside in Marin County.

As he sat on a small bench in front of the Magic Piano, Kevin experienced enchantment.  What four-year-old doesn’t?  And what fifty-year-old does?  There is a line in one of my favorite poems, “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” by e. e. cummings – “and down they forgot as up they grew.”

But you don’t have to forget.  I’m still amazed each time I see a Boeing 747 take off.  The first 747 I ever saw nosed to the gate at LAX and my brother David, a perennial kid himself, said, “It’s so big because it carries really big people.”  We laughed.  The first folks off the plane, no doubt traveling first class, were giants – the New York Knicks.  David was magic, and ten years ago he was gone.

The magic moments are out there, and in you, all of them, all of the time.  You can experience magic whenever you wish, whether at Disneyland or not.  There is no time or age limit.  As the Queen in Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter said, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Your life is filled with magic right now – the miracle of the Internet.  And how about your dog, greeting you at home tonight?  Or that love letter to a friend which you can write today, or the love letter you received when you were sixteen?  I carried one in my wallet for more than fifty years — a love note from fourteen year old Sue.  And five years ago I danced with Sue on her 65^th birthday.

When you open your eyes, your imagination, and your heart, those moments will find you, fill you, and leave you with dreams which are not so impossible after all.

Together with four year old Kevin, I am astonished by a Magic Piano everywhere I go.  I remember so many moments about which I can say, “The kids at school are never going to believe this!”

Next Tuesday: People With Goals Use People Without Goals. You will find this very interesting.

Alan