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indivisibly mixed in our experience. We know, also from our experience, that the rational, measured-out, logical model is not always sufficient when dealing with life’s realities. This insufficiency can sometimes have a lofty spiritual import and sometimes be quite practical and everyday. Enchantment is an example. Any husband who has given his wife a quick solution for her problems only to see her become angrier knows this. “I need you to listen to me,” she may say. She doesn’t want a rational formula to ease her distress. She won’t be happier if he gives her statistics on how many other women feel as she does. She wants him to become enchanted, to enter so deeply into her distress that his view of the world is changed and the insult of easy answers is no longer possible. Enchantment always causes complications. He is wise to resist, as she is equally wise to press for a true connection and nothing less.
    Enchantment frightens us for good reason. Whether it’s enchantment of the ordinary kind or the magical kind, it may very well change us, and we may not be able to return to our old selves, to our old certainties and our easy understandings. Magical people seem to fear that less than the rest of us. They want to be enchanted and are quite willing to be changed forever as they go deeper and deeper into realms beyond everyday understanding. Most of us wouldn’t mind a little more magic ourselves, if we could slip in and out of it. We too want to leave the drab realities of work-a-day life, to experience the transcendent, to revel in endless possibility. But most of us have lost any belief in good magic. All that’s left is a vague sense that evil is afoot and ready to draw nearer. The only magic most of us believe in is the scary stuff.
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    M any of the magical stories I heard as I traveled featured friendly visitors, spirits of the known dead coming back to comfort the living, happy coincidences, and fortunate omens, but a surprising number were of malevolent spooks and eerie happenings. Two acquaintances told me they suspected their suburban houses of harboring a bad spirit. Both have teenage daughters, traditional attractors of such beings. Two sisters told of the night when a cold, controlling being came into a hotel room, demanding that one of them go with him; the other sister held on to her sibling and refused to give in to him. A pretty young divorcée talked of the night she awoke to feel that something had crept into bed with her. She felt a hand smooth her hair and she saw the bedcovers move.
    A woman whose background was born-again Christian told of reading a book on voodoo until deep in the night. She fell asleep and then awoke to see half-human, half-animal figures roaming about on the landing outside her bedroom door. She had never seen or imagined such beings. The book had not included them.
    â€œI was not asleep,” she said. “I was completely awake. I know I was because I reached out to touch the wall beside me.”
    â€œWhat did you do about the creatures?” I asked, knowing that she had left the religious assurances of childhood beliefs far behind.
    â€œI called on the blood of Jesus,” she said, her voice going high with emotion.
    â€œGood idea,” I said. Old habits die hard, which is sometimes for the best.
    Then she went to sleep, and the next morning she told her husband.
    â€œThose sound like lwa,” he said, referring to voodoo spirits; he then described what she had seen. The next week she saw a voodooexhibit that also pictured exactly the figures she had seen. She put the voodoo book away and hasn’t read anything like it since.
    I heard about black women who burned the hair left in their brushes and a Jewish woman who wrapped such hair in toilet paper, taped it up, and flushed it down the commode. They feared that if the hair wasn’t disposed of properly, birds would find it and build nests, which would cause those