I only know one magic trick. It’s called the Color-Changing Aces, which I learned when I was eight years old and was obsessed with becoming a magician. It’s a simple trick, using a very basic sleight of hand—the double lift—and it’s pretty much only impressive to an eight-year-old. Luckily, I have two boys around that age now, and so, to Sam and Liam at least, I am finally making magic.

This is the trick: After separating the four aces from a deck of cards, I shuffle the four cards, then hand the boys each of the red aces, face down, while placing the black aces face down in front of me. But they don’t realize that each time I show them a red ace from the top of the deck, I secretly lift two cards so the real top card, a black ace, remains hidden. They think they have a red ace. Then, abracadabra: they flip their cards to reveal the black aces, and I triumphantly reveal the red ones.

Like I said, not super impressive, but it amazed my sons. They were completely sure they held those red aces, confident in the outcome until their expectations were completely upended. And then they delighted in the surprise.

I showed them that trick for the first time during the spring of 2020, in the early months of the pandemic, after our world shrank down to about the size of our Brunswick backyard. We trudged through virtual school, then the rest of the time my wife and I took them on walks, explored the woods, watched movies, and played games. Despite all the stresses of the world, we found some happiness in just being together.

“Life is full of tricks—and sometimes those tricks will upend our whole world.”

One of those days, after tricking them into practicing math by teaching them solitaire, I showed them the Color-Changing Aces. They asked for the trick again and again and begged to know the secret, which led to me digging out my old magic book and the magic set their uncle had gifted them for Christmas. They made coins disappear and reappear in a little plastic box, linked and unlinked rings, vanished foam balls in their palms. All the same tricks I remember practicing obsessively as a kid.

We read The Magic Misfits series at bedtime and laughed at Magic for Humans on Netflix. On YouTube, we found the old David Copperfield television specials I had taped and watched with religious devotion at their age. My childhood thrills echoed as they, too, marveled at Copperfield turning a paper flower into a real rose, or levitating a train car before making it disappear.

We learned that, despite lockdowns and empty theaters, magicians were still finding ways to perform, pivoting to live virtual shows on Zoom. I bought a ticket to one, and soon a gilded black box appeared at our house, along with strict instructions not to open it until showtime. It sat on my desk for a week, our anticipation building.

During the Zoom performance, which we huddled around my laptop to watch, we weren’t just a passive audience; we were an active part of the show. The magician made a unique place from my past appear on a postcard in my hands; Sam moved a pendulum with his mind; Liam bent a brass key with his bare hands; we drew a card from a shuffled deck and then a copy of it burst from that little black box; an image of a red balloon appeared right before us.

That night the world expanded, just a bit, for the first time since it had so suddenly contracted. Just months before, lockdowns and quarantines had seemed like impossibilities, but they’d appeared. And we kept on, finding amazement and delight despite it all.

That night also showed me, now that I’m older, that I approach magic differently. As a kid, I pored over those tapes of David Copperfield, trying to figure out all the tricks. My sons do the same, replaying and debating and pantomiming the motions of these new magicians. But the mechanisms of the tricks don’t matter to me anymore.

What matters now is the delight and wonder that appear after. It seems even more essential now to find happiness wherever and whenever we can, especially when the world leads us to expect one outcome and then hands us another. Life is full of tricks—and sometimes those tricks will upend our whole world—but there is always the possibility to find happiness, to find wonder, to find joy.

That is perhaps the only real magic I can teach my sons.

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