(Reprinted from the Studio 'Zine) MESSENGERS OF MAGIC by Marylinn Kelly As young children, my brother and I each had imaginary friends. His were both named Robert. Mine were named for three of my mother's college sorority sisters and they regularly joined me for imaginary tea. Our sister didn't play with imaginary friends, but DID have a stuffed bear named Elmira who alternately received rejection slips and checks from magazine publishers. There were days when the family junk mail held nothing for the anxious bear, then there would be a check and we could all rejoice. When the manuscript, which she sometimes got back, was turned down, we spoke softly and allowed Elmira her disappointment. Looking back on our fantasy play, I see us as children into whose lives a great big handful of magic beans had fallen. It is beyond my knowing, whether we created alternate worlds to escape the ordinary one or whether our make-believe was simply a product of being children, particulary children of parents who were also well connected to imagination. A writer father and artist mother gave us a genetic heritage for invention, for enchantment. Thomas Moore, in "The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life," summarizes, "Enchantment is a spell that comes over us, an aura of fantasy and emotions that can settle on the heart and either disturb it or send it into rapture and reverie." Or both. My definition of enchantment includes the introduction of possibilities. As we grew, our childhoods were visited by real messengers of magic in the forms of people our parents knew. Many of them were drawn by our father's newspaper column, in which he wrote humor and history, first-person accounts of travel and meetings with remarkable men, reviews, recommendations and speculation. He became, among other titles, the local, unofficial expert on flying saucers and for years heard the accounts and was offered the evidence of numerous encounters. It was through this door that Jackie and Sandy walked. A retired couple, they spent their summers traveling throughout North America with a carnival, he doing card tricks and she telling fortunes. They also loved the desert, a passion shared with our dad, and Jackie had seen flying saucers. They became our godparents in non-ordinary reality and made our back-country desert trips much livelier with their tales of carney life, their successful searching for ghost towns and their unshakable belief in things which could not be explained. The newspaper column was also the entre for an actual and larger-than-life treasure hunter, a man we called Uncle Romaine who traveled alone into the jungles of Mexico and South America looking for stories, artifacts and lost civilizations. Our father co-wrote some of his tales for men's adventure magazines, back in the early and mid-fifties, and we loved to watch him on televison, a local show called "I Search for Adventure," on which he shared films of his expeditions. Each time he returned from these often dangerous excursions, he brought the raw footage he'd shot and show it to all of us first. On one South American trip, he found a coatamundi named Panchito, which he smuggled on the plane inside his jacket and which roamed around our living room, nibbling the dust jackets off books on the lowest shelves. Uncle Romaine came and spoke to my fourth grade class, demonstrating a blow gun and poison darts. I was a heroine-by-association that day. There were others, some were friends from our dad's college days, science fiction and mystery writers; our family doctor who experimented with leeches (not on us) and knew about cooking rattlesnake; a motorcycle cop who taught us how to dig for arrowheads along the California coast; a museum curator who showed us through dim storerooms, similar to a scene from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and who spoke Native American dialects and knew sacred dances. Any hours we spent in the company of these friends made our hearts lighter, our minds race. But it was overhearing the nighttime conversations that truly released the enchantment. My brother and I were past 50 when we first spoke of the nights we would lie quietly in our rooms, pretending to sleep and fighting to stay awake in our tiny house so we could hear the grown-up talk that emerged when any of these thrilling beings visited our parents. Our younger sister sometimes slept through these hours, episodes right out of AMAZING STORIES, but we struggled to hear every word. THIS was when the aliens and the ghosts and the seances, the spiders and the shrunken heads, the impossible and the terrifying and the gruesome got shared. This was the REALLY good stuff. So we strained and listened, letting ourselves experience how enormous and unknowable the world really was, finding in these low-voiced revelations not something to frighten us, but something to encourage and empower. We felt that we had been let in on The Secrets, allowed to know, perhaps unintentionally, that life, rich and full, existed beyond what the eye could see. The three of us grown children still carry those stories and their tellers in our pockets like touchstones, like arrowheads or ghost town glass, like magic beans.