A Different Magic

Never have I had a harder time picking an adjective in my life. There are moments I've had in my life that were --  amazing? Overused. Magical? Cliche. Wonderful? -- It seems we've taken the magic out of these adjectives. And in the moment I'm about to describe, I experienced magic, and I allowed it to change me. (Note: I know "Woodchuck" below to be a derogatory term, and I know that I'm showing classism, but I have to write this about the me I WAS rather than the me that I AM NOW. And I'm still learning about how I'm classist.)

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This incident happened in upstate New York, a place full of thick woods, looming hills, shimmering lakes, and secrets. Washington Irving wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, distinctly American fairytales, about those secrets. I lived in the Upper Catskill region, and the thunder in the hills did sound like giants bowling in hidden places. But at any rate, this was my brush with magic, and it wasn't what you might think.


I had made friends with the manager of a beer and wine supply shop. I would visit him in the summer when I got bored because I lived alone and I couldn't hang out at the coffee shop forever. Besides, I thought Scott was cute. I would never have dated Scott because our worlds were too dissimilar: I was a professor seeking tenure and wearing suits; he was what locals called a "Woodchuck" -- an impoverished resident of the Catskills who typically lives off tourism in the summer, and welfare in the winter.

I walked into the store that day, greeted by the now-familiar setting -- rough-hewn, dark wood; big squared barn windows; two-by-twelve shelves with boxes of rubber stoppers, gaskets, plastic airlocks, bottle caps and corks; a back room with the bigger merchandise like carboys and corkers and spargers. I wondered, not for the first time, if the space had been a stable or a work shed in an earlier life.

My friend Scott stood at the counter, ridiculously tall and skinny. His straight black hair fell past his shoulders in keeping with his Blackfoot heritage and set off pale skin befitting his German and Scottish heritage.  He squinted at me through his thick steel-frame glasses and grinned. "My friend's coming over in a bit. He's bringing some hopped sparkling mead over to taste. Should be good."

I made wine and mead, which was how I'd found Scott's shop in the first place. I knew that mead could be divided into "wine-like" and "beer-like". I made the wine-type, of course -- slightly sweet, not bubbly, sometimes herbal. I'd never had beer-like mead -- bubbly, slightly bitter from hops. I decided to stay around, having nothing better to do.

Scott and I indulged ourselves in storytelling while waiting. Both sides of my family treated storytelling as a major ritual in getting to know people, and I honored the oral tradition by exchanging stories whenever I got the chance --

"... I woke up that morning, and my mother was gone. No, completely gone. All her belongings were gone, all the furniture was gone, and she had left me a note that said, 'You're responsible for the apartment now. I've moved in with my boyfriend.'"

Just as I had recovered from the ending, a stocky, sun-browned man with shoulder-length golden hair and goatee arrived with a bag, from which he pulled out two big brown bottles.

"Hey, Scott, do you have a bottle opener?" he growled, and I noted his leather biker's cap, wondering how it would look on me. I was not going to ask.

"Ha ha," Scott snorted and pulled out his bottle opener and three glass tumblers from behind the rough counter.

"Would you like some?" Greg asked, more gallantly than I had expected for a biker.

"Sure," I replied, and he poured me a tumbler full.

I took a deep drink, and then another. Smoother than beer, scented with honey and fragrant hops, I knew I tasted something rare and rich. I felt a tingle, almost like a shimmer of gold, slide from my toes to my head --

I sat down abruptly, feeling tipsy yet not tipsy. I felt -- not vague, but as if a golden mist had surrounded me, surrounded everything. Greg examined his mead against the light from the window, and it seemed that Arthur Pendragon, dressed in jeans and boots, drank of the Holy Grail. Scott limped across the room to look out a window, and I spied the Fisher King who had held the Grail before Arthur.

I excused myself, feeling small against such august personages, and stumbled into the sun, where I discovered that ordinary people had become mighty, and I, in turn, had become ordinary.