[15 July, 2024]

My father is dead. It happened three months ago. Just like that, without any warning. “Bad luck,” the doctors said. And I had to deal with that. Constantly searching for him in everything, I wrestle my way through the days.

It must have been my desire for a miracle that landed me in Abbott’s Magic Shop in colorful Colon, Michigan, the Magic Capital of the World—the place where both things and people disappear and reappear by just a snap of the finger.

“Can you please do a trick?” I ask Greg Bordner, the store’s owner. “Dogs do tricks. I perform miracles,” he says in his typical drawl that is punctuated by deep gulps of air, and the occasional self-conscious chuckle.

While showing a bang gun—“No one got hurt with this one!”—handmade from wood, metal and dyed silk, he tells me that magic is hard work. Many people here have spent years working on thousands of tricks. “Each one of these has a story.” He points to the cardboard boxes behind him, all filled to the brim with secrets.

Greg’s father, Recil, grew up in a farming family in Ohio, and even though the farm gave him a stable future, it did not interest him much. “One day he built a levitation so he could float his sister,” Greg says. “Uh, you know, doesn’t everybody?” He laughs.

Initially, his father wanted to perform as a mind-reader, but his first mind-reading show was also his last—people insisted on asking him to predict the future, particularly that of the stock market. Magician, he realized, was a better fit for him. It was the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it seemed the world was in need of some magic. He spent his days working on his magic in the countryside, and one day he met Percy Abbott, a world-renowned Australian magician, who came to town with a show. With Abbott’s tutelage, Recil grew into a real magician, eventually becoming Abbott’s business partner and the co-owner of Abbott’s Magic Shop in Michigan.

Greg followed in his father’s footsteps, growing into a real magician in his own right, too. He was nine when he started creating his own little magic tricks. Now, 60 years later, remembering those early attempts, he laughs: “I wasn’t very good, but my dad was impressed that at least I tried.”

Sitting in the quiet basement where many people once worked diligently, the silence suddenly overwhelms me. “Is magic dying out?” I ask him. “It’s the second oldest profession,” Greg says. “People want to believe. People want to dream. That they can snap their fingers and money will appear. Or flowers. Or animals.”

Or my father.