When the Magic Fades

It feels like autumn this morning. The sky is a somber gray and the leaves of the oak trees glisten with moisture. The world is very still.

I know it really isn’t autumn yet. We have days to go to the equinox that clocks Earth’s time through space.

Meteorologists say it’s only a marine layer moving inland that wets the sky and darkens the morning. I will tell you differently.

What defines this passage of seasons, what brings this twilight pause before winter, is the fact that the kids are going back to school, and with them for the very first time in his life is my friend Jeffrey.

He was among the 700,000 young people in the L.A. Unified School District to bid goodbye to summer and take to the path that leads to adulthood.

It isn’t an easy trail and at the kindergarten level Jeffrey is at the very start of the trip. Many twists and turns lie ahead.

He may have sensed that as he dressed on the morning of his first day, silently assessing the adventure ahead. He took a last look back at the scattered toys of summer, at the infancy that seemed to shimmer in the gray light, and then marched bravely into the car and settled himself.

As the house of his innocence faded behind him, he turned to his mother and said, “You know, I’m not very lucky. I have to go to school.”

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Growing up isn’t easy. A sense of apprehension, like the gray skies of autumn, shrouds the world in a hesitancy that precedes winter. What lies ahead? What storms will the young face in the unfolding biography of new seasons?

To each generation falls the necessity to endure great peril and great wonders. Mine has seen war and space flight, Hitler and Einstein, AIDS and the Internet, nuclear missiles and Martin Luther King.

The contradictions have been immense, enough to addle the mind into insensibility. I was born into a family without food, grew up in a war, fought in another war and began struggling to achieve in a world that increasingly celebrated mediocrity.

“But here I am,” I said to Jeffrey the day before he started kindergarten, “and going to school helped me get here.”

“I still hate it,” he said in a tone that defied debate. Going to school meant acknowledging a metamorphosis from babyhood to youth. The infant Jeffrey was to be left at the doorstep. A little boy would march into change.

I tried to explain the wonders of learning until a truth unexpectedly emerged. I have always played the game of magic with him, making a ball “disappear” under an arm and having it reappear suddenly to his delight.

But as I hid the ball this time, on the day before kindergarten, he looked at me, smiled a tolerant smile and reached under my arm where the ball was hidden. He had learned. The magic was gone.

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It occurred to me at that moment what the step from infancy into kindergarten meant. Jeffrey was trading magic for knowledge, observing the transition with the simplicity of a gesture unfettered by guile.

That’s what learning has been all about, emerging from the dream time of human history’s age of magic and mystery to the realization that wonders can be studied if not always explained.

We have learned that fire can be created, that the world is a dot among the stars, that lightning is a natural phenomenon and not a thunderbolt from an angry god and that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

That does not detract in a broader sense, however, from the proposition that there is a kind of magic to life itself, to sunset’s fiery kiss, to the surge of humanity forward, to the mechanisms of the human brain and to gray mornings that precipitate passing seasons.

If all of our Jeffreys can survive life’s perils and duplicities as they journey toward knowledge, they will discover at school’s end there remains a challenging world to behold.

“How great it is,” a friend, Betty Lello, said as we discussed the trek of the kindergartners. “Everything will be brand new to them. What discoveries they have in store!” A retired teacher just turned 91, she understands that wonder exists in knowledge itself.

It’s just that a new kind of magic lies amid the mottled light of changing seasons. To each child on his way to kindergarten falls the task of figuring out just what makes that magic work.

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Al Martinez’ column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com