THE MAGICAL CVS AUTOMATIC DOOR WAND
The thousands upon thousands of children’s storybooks that merrily surround customers at Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories count for nothing when pitted against the creative and spontaneous imagination of children left to their own magical meanderings.
I’m in front of this particular CVS store, one that sports those automatic sliding aluminum-and-glass doors, doors that open and close depending upon who or what triggers the electric eye that never blinks.
Only the small girl standing inside near the door has no inkling of what makes these doors open and close, so when she moves near them in order to go outside, they quickly and Star Trekkily whoosh open. She stands looking up at the doors in abject wonder and surprise and backs away to get a better look. This causes the doors to whoosh closed, thus making the little girl in the red dress freeze in her tracks in an attempt to figure things out.
She’s temporarily unsupervised, so at this exact moment, she exists only in her self-made world and must bravely use her own mind without the stiff intervention of adults. Her eyebrows go up, an idea pops like a light bulb above her head, and she decides that she possesses magical powers, just like those magical powers that characters in her storybooks use.
She waves her magic-wand arms toward the doors and they open. Now, she has proof that the Power is hers! She backs off to survey her tiny kingdom, and the doors close again. She jumps up and down, claps her hands and smiles Cheshire-like into the morning air.
The adults around her do not notice her drama, and she tentatively repeats it now and then.
Just as suddenly as it all began, the little red-dress girl is pulled by her adult companion towards the rear of the store, and the magical spell is broken.
Only she and I know that we just witnessed a miracle that nobody else will ever understand quite the way we understand it
© Jim Reed 2010 A.D.