Earlier this week I am held hostage in my own home.

Boy, home “sick” from school, is bored. He can’t have his phone during these missed school hours, and his urge to crank away at that language arts project–like any real illness–escapes him. He passes the time looking up card tricks online. He gets one under his belt, then maybe half another one, and he is on the road. “Hey Mom, hey! Look at this. Pick a card…” I obey. It is the five of clubs. “Now look at it. Go ahead, look at it, but don’t show me what it is.” His thinking furrows the brow and makes his delivery choppy, like a glitching screen. Like most of what he does these days, his doing far outstrips his thinking. Is he waiting for me to step in and correct him? I was perfectly happy minding my own business, making phone calls and banging out emails. List a mile long. “Okay, Mom. Good. Now remember it.” We’re only two steps into a 10-step trick and I am going to bomb on “Okay, remember it.” Girl, get your focus on.

I take the five of clubs and bury it in the fan of cards being presented to me. He bricks them back together, claps them on the table and attempts to shuffle, first this way, then that; the new cards stiff and unyielding. With surprise I notice his hands. Not little boy Lego hands, pudgy and full, but longer, more defined and articulated. Homo habilus. They are tools. This is my boy, who still looks like he has to hop around in a shower to get wet. He is all tall, all lanky, loosely assembled. Like they ordered the wrong parts. Or a few spares. Maybe you would call him slim, like his jeans do, or skinny, like some mean middle school peer, but if you really study him you can see in his extremities the man he is becoming. Like a puppy who comes with paws promising way more dog in store.

His hands are long like the rest of him, his fingers strong and dextrous. There is a world of knowing in them and a maturity that seems to have escaped every other part of his body. They can clean a carburetor or command a saxophone, they have ripped the cord to the most unyielding small engines on the planet–go-karts and lawn tractors; they have dug pet graves and applied miles of Scotch to Christmas packages; they have penned apologies, clung to handle bars on downhill careens through the wood; they have supported his weight from every tree, pole, and doorframe he has hung from, they have pulled injured buddies from the playing field and worked math problems and powered video games whose inanity seems without limit (“Your henhouses are full!”); they have clapped and cooked and cradled and comforted, and they–invariably–handle food when they are at their filthiest. Now, they wrap around the card deck with an earnest industry he is trying to sell as casual. And they spin out these unrelenting tricks when I am–er, was at my most productive.

By midmorning he is up to half a dozen pretty impressive card tricks. I have to admit. At least I can’t figure them out. That might be because Monday being my one day at home, I am at one with my phone calls, bills, emails and housework. So being constantly interrupted by card-wielding boy is unusual and unwelcome. Did I just say that??! WELCOME! Welcome unpredictability! and Welcome serendipitous and unlooked-for diversion! Did you know that the two defining arms of the word “chance” are “risk” and “opportunity,” one of which he takes for all it’s worth and one of which he might miss. But I won’t. I won’t miss this opportunity to be embraced by magic. By lunch time we’re up to 15 or so and by late afternoon he’s got 20 different card tricks written down on a little grocery list pad. I, his mandatory audience, have visions of the time repurposed to schoolwork dance through my head, then “poof” vanish like a bunny in a hat. “Hey mom! Okay, check this out. Pick a card…” And each one, seemingly after seconds of investment (Where is this photographic memory when you have a Civics test??!) Selective eidesis, perhaps? PERFECT. Absolutely spot-on perfect. He produces my card each and every time.

Part of the appeal in a card trick, I learn, is the ethos of a bubblehead. Even the best of them come with an aura, a hint, that the executor is not quite sure of the outcome either; that he, too, is a little disbelieving he’s actually going to produce your card. His curiosity is his hook. So my maestro shows me Chris Pratt on a YouTube talk show holding his audience spell-bound, looking as though he couldn’t count the cards let alone produce a trick worthy of entertainment. Sure enough, eight or 10 paces into a seemingly random, garden variety card trick, Chris Pratt is flailing and his on-stage audience is actually starting to chuckle and distance themselves from his bumbling consternation. Will mimics this on-stage cluelessness, asking me no fewer than eight times, with great fanfare and freight each time, “Is this your card?” for cards that are indeed, not. Not even close. I forget where we are even. But I don’t forget my card. And right before incredulity and disappointment close for a commercial break, sure enough, Will slaps three of four cards out of my hand and the remaining card–I turn it over–is MINE!

Part of the appeal in raising a boy is the ethos of a bubblehead. Signs abound. Pajamas and hand-washing aside, there are all number of other conventions that have been dispensed with in the name of–Pick one!–homework? School? Hygiene? In the sixth grade he dropped a few syllables and took the name that now captures the raw, unrestrained push deep in him toward all that is alive. I didn’t notice it then, seemed like just a hair change or a wardrobe experiment that are so common these days. Jeans in sweltering 90 degree June and shorts here, now, eve of our first frost and he blue-kneed. Yet as he grows, daily, quietly, I see the lack of accident: out of William into Will, a firehose of being which, where pointed, springs life into things. Or life unexpected anyway. I, of course, want him to direct that will into conventional things. Like school. And homework. And grades. And “performance” and achievement and pleasing people. Boy could not care less what it smells/looks/sounds like. Some days he comes in so dirty he cannot sit on the furniture. He put the “in” in inappropriate and took care of both the “oh” and the “no.” But he cares how it feels. He cares how it is made. And what it can do. Oh, how he cares.

Observe, ladies and gentlemen: Boy, 13. Speed largely outpacing maturity at this stage; his designs on life overpower his commitment, and all of it slightly ahead of good judgement. Chief questions at this stage: How fast can it go? and Does it burn? And yet, his best trick, even to this very day? Well, it’s like magic. His curiosity is his hook. Sweetness, helpfulness, and sensitivity to the underlying strains of life you can still hear if you pause to listen. My lists are long and my days are dumb busy, but I can still hear it. Sometimes. He hears it, I can tell. And he will answer back with his middle school passion and pursuit: a baritone saxophone. Didn’t quite sleep with it the way he did the new skateboard, roller blades and even new shoes when he was (much) younger. But I find him polishing it, studying its parts as he takes it out of the case or puts it away, and he is always happy to tutor me, to point out its intricacies and unexpected manipulations: “Look Mom, look this is so cool… You wouldn’t think, by pressing here, that such a sound would come from there…, See? Listen…” William, I could say the same about parenting. Or life, for that matter, my boy. You would not think…..

The instrument: He has never forgotten it, lost it, or damaged it looking for the mysteries of the universe; he practices without being asked and with such intent that I for a single moment wish to wave a wand and turn the instrument into school work. Ah, how much further down the track we would be then. Then I come to my senses and realize that this is life’s work, eminently so much more important than school work, and we ARE already further down the track. So from the outside he’s just fumbling cards and coming up clueless, when from the beginning he’s had it all along, and coming alongside this boy is to see clearly that wink, wink, he’s paying way more attention than you think and may, actually, leave you speechless with wonder and delight. Pick a card, any card. Ace. Of. Hearts.

Later in the evening we do the bedtime dance trick that I’ve been perfecting close to 10 years now. It is so ridiculous to be dancing it still with a teenager, but there days all my cracks are showing. I pick the Joker. He’s up! He’s down! He’s unplugged–but, no! He’s gotta check one thing…. Boy takes for freeeeeeaking ever. And I realize midway through, child of my later life, that I am very clearly communicating that I need to be done, that you just need to go to bed because I need to be done. Sorry, son. Send me the therapist’s bill some day. But then, I’m a mom, and no mom puts a crying baby down. (Easily). So I always go back to say good night even if I’ve nagged badgered and taken away his phone, electronics, breathing air and everything else I think I can rescind. You all set, boy? Good night. Hope you slee— I kneel down by his bed in the darkened room, so dark I can’t see his face and not planning to pray, at least not aloud–mostly it’s just to get close to him, my moving target, and to convince myself that the adolescent distance and disregard that accumulate each day can be dissolved with a wave of a wand. See I have here five separate rings. Five separate rings, Ladies and Gents, all closed, all spinning, all separate and apart…. In one broad and messy stroke of life, my Will–he has connected us like magic.

He’s so long and bony I can’t fit on the edge of the bed. So I kneel down and go to rub his back like other nights, oh so long ago (or were they yesterday?) but up he pops, half-propped. He’s still dressed! Still on. I think he’s explained to me that changing into PJs is pointless, like it comes up quite wanting on the “life efficiency meter”–the same scale that caused him to decide to “cut down on showers” at boy scout camp last summer and to stop putting stuff away in his room all the time where you can’t find it. He pulls the covers down and reaches to the nightstand for his stack, starts fanning it out one more time. I think I can hear him smile in the dark. “Okay, Mom, pick a card.”