Free Not In Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker Page A

fascinating, he can call himself a loser or an immortal vampire. He chooses vampire. He concentrates on that, thinks about it a lot, has dreams about it, meditates, and has imaginary experiences, which he interprets as past life memories. He is affirmed, knows who he is, and knows how to live. Soon he looks on the Internet. He finds other people who feel the same way. They band together, exchange stories, spin theories, and form a group.
    Now let’s apply sociology. These are odd times we live in. Reacting in odd ways to the loneliness of a society without real community, one in which extended families don’t live together and the banalities of television and rock music substitute for human interaction, wouldn’t be that unusual.
    It makes a neat package. End of story.
    So why wasn’t I content? I liked being so smart. It made me feel good to have figured it all out, but a person can be too smart for her own good. I’d taken the vampire’s story, categorized it, labeled it, and minimized it. I’d done to the vampire what all of us have learned to do to ourselves and to almost any new idea that comes along. Whenever we don’t think the way everyone else does, or see what everyone else sees or believe what everyone believes, we reason it away.
    It isn’t a bad technique, unless the technique starts running the technician. Anybody who does that enough can find that she has stopped heeding her own feelings and stopped believing her own experiences unless they can be fitted into a mold. And once she does that, there’s no ground under her feet. Pretty soon it doesn’t matter what new information comes in, she’s got a slot all ready for it and she never learns a thing but what she already knew.
    I’d seen it happen to lots of people. To myself maybe.
    By demythologizing the magical people, I’d satisfied the little scientist within myself, but in truth it had been too easy. From the beginning of my investigations into magical culture, I’d sensed that the people I was talking to were behaving within an enchantment I wasn’t part of.
    For instance, I was told that Salem witch Shawn Poirier could enchant dolls so that they moved. Several of Shawn’s friends told me that one. He had enchanted the dolls in the window of a shop calledthe Crystal Moon. “Sometimes I sit on that bench outside and just watch them move. Try it out,” one of the witches said.
    I was eager to do that. In the world of magic, you hear lots of stories that lots of people are willing to swear by, but it’s pretty rare that you get to see something done that can’t be called coincidence. If those dolls moved, I’d relocate to Salem and start studying the Craft.
    The next day when the shop was closed, I went to the bench that faces the window and sat down. There were dolls in the window, fairy creatures hanging from strings. Maybe one or two of them moved, and maybe Shawn was the reason, but I suspected a current of air. None of them blinked or moved their little glass heads while I was looking. It wasn’t magic enough for me. I felt a little silly at having been so excited.
    Who would this be magic enough for? And then I remembered that the man who had most fervently assured me the dolls moved was the fiancé of the shop’s owner. He was crazy in love with her, had been since they were teenagers. She’d been married twice before, and he had mooned after her through those marriages and his own. She was a witch. So now he was a witch. They both credited a love spell with bringing them together. That’s the kind of man who would sit and watch these dolls swing on their strings and be enchanted. A man bedazzled already.
    Another time, a Salem magician told me that an early lesson for his magical students was learning how to blow up clouds. They would stand looking at the sky and pick a cloud to focus on. Not a big cloud, because that would require more power than