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I was about 6 years old when I discovered that I have an extraordinary talent for making things disappear.
I owned a Barlow jackknife that had both a long blade and a short blade. This meant that I was prepared for anything from fending off a ferocious tiger to cleaning my fingernails. That pocketknife was my constant companion.
One day I decided to try my hand at whittling, having found a funky stick that looked as though it could be carved into a likeness of the Statue of Liberty. I reached into my jeans pocket and found... nothing! Well, not exactly nothing. There were a few old gum wrappers and some interesting lint, but nothing else of value.
Then it dawned on me: my jackknife had disappeared! I surmised that I must have somehow acquired the power to make things dematerialize. This seemed like the only logical explanation.
But this ability wasn't limited to just making things vanish. I found that I could also make things rematerialize when my jackknife was spotted atop a fencepost where I had paused for the cause a few days earlier. My abilities were both astonishing and uncontrollable.
My capabilities for making things vanish only increased as time went on. It wasn't long before I was disappearing toys and socks - but always just one sock - before graduating onto keys and tools.
This ability to vanish things eventually grew to the point where I was able to disappear an actual car.
Some years ago, my wife and I attended a dairy-related event in St. Cloud, Minnesota. We parked our car in an underground ramp and went on our merry way.
We returned to the parking ramp when it was time to leave only to discover that our car was gone. And on top of that, some jerk had taken our parking spot!
Left with no choice, we took the elevator up to the ground floor where the cellphone reception was strong enough to alert the authorities. But before I could place the call, my wife said, "Wait. Let's try something first."
We got back into the elevator, and my wife pushed a button. We walked down a row of vehicles -- and there sat our car! My wife claimed that this was because she pushed a different button than I had a few minutes earlier, but I knew better. My disappearing and reappearing powers were up to their usual tricks.
A standard magician's illusion is to make an assistant disappear. I hate to brag, but I seem to have mastered that feat decades ago, when our two sons were little.
For instance, I might walk into the house and my wife might exclaim, "Where were you?
It's been chaos around here! I had to put band-aids on the three-year-old after the cat scratched him when he pulled her tail and the baby had a diaper that should have been declared an EPA superfund site!"
I could only shrug and mumble that I had no control over this curse of disappearing.
"Ha!" she retorted, "You always vanish whenever there's a stinky diaper!"
One might think that my power to randomly disappear stuff would fade with the turning of the years. The opposite has proven to be true.
Things are vanishing with escalating frequency. And we're talking about items that can, or at least should be, within easy reach.
For example, I might be working on something in my shop. I'll reach for a necessary item -- and not something weenie like a cotter pin -- only to discover that it's gone. The item, let's say a ballpeen hammer, was an arm's length away moments before but is now nowhere to be seen.
A search of the immediate area is conducted with ever-increasing frustration. Finally, after scouring the entire shop and its surrounding environs, the hammer is discovered to be reclining languidly next to the bench vise.
Perhaps an alien spaceship used its transporter beam to bring my hammer aboard, examine it, then beam it back down onto the bench. I think a much likelier explanation is that my preternatural and unmanageable power to disappear stuff was pranking me yet again.
This might sound overblown, but my capacity for disappearing things has expanded to the point where it now involves the very fabric of the universe.
That's right: I have somehow acquired the ability to cause time to evaporate.
My wife and I might be talking about an event and agree that it happened just recently. But then we consult our camera rolls and find that it took place years ago!
"How can that be?" she'll ask.
"I can't control my vanishment powers," I'll reply. "And time flies when you're having fun."
-- Jerry's book, "Dear County Agent Guy," is available at amazon.com and at booksellers nationwide.