JonasCain.com

As a teenager, around the age of fifteen or so, I dreamed of going on a bicycle ride…as far as my imagination would take me. Not merely a day trip, but a journey; lasting days, weeks, months. Don’t know exactly what it was that inspired such an ambition. I was riding my bicycle a lot during that time, as I was not yet old enough to have a drivers license yet old enough to not want to be home anymore. I always had bigger plans. Perhaps the bicycle represented my ticket to freedom; a freedom from where I was, who I had been and to where and who I was meant to become.

We never truly know why we imagine such things until the day that a few key pieces of the puzzle fills in the spaces between our dreams and reality, revealing a picture that’s always been there yet not yet ready to be seen.

Spent the early years of my childhood growing up in a small town in Western Massachusetts. Warren was, and as I imagine still is, a disturbingly quiet town with a strange history. From a D.A.R.E. officer addicted to drugs; a resident notorious for being documented as possessed by the devil; and a trailer park built on a former leper colony. It is in the latter where I spent the first ten years of my life.

I was quiet. Reserved. Seldom spoke. Took life very literally which made it impossible for me to find humor in anything. One Halloween my parents threw a costume party for me and my school friends. I dressed as Groucho Marx so that I could wear a suit. The loud noise of party goers enjoying themselves made me hideaway in my room crying. My mother had to explain to me that that is what parties are about. Was incredibly organized; always had something to clean. My mother once had to punish me for cleaning my room too much. “Stop cleaning your room right this instant and watch TV!” Today I find the humor and irony in that circumstance but at the time it seemed like the worst punishment imaginable.

Spent most of the time living in my head filled with wild imaginations of a magical world where the impossible was possible. Children are so often told, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” yet in my mind all things were possible. From magic carpets to transforming the world around me to be anywhere I wanted to be. The ability to dream it then immediately live it. As with all children I had a wild imagination and the insatiable desire to express it. Perhaps that is why I embraced music and magic at such an early age.

For as long as I can remember I was always singing, making up songs and creating music with anything I found around me. I recall asking my parents one day if they would buy me a saxophone. At the time the instrument was bigger than I was so they naturally said no. My family was also of very modest means so they were of course reluctant to make such an expensive investment. It was the biggest thrill of my young life the day they surprised me with my first saxophone. Seventeen years later I can still remember not having a clue how to play a single note sitting in my bedroom alone and making noise on the Jupiter alto saxophone.

It wasn’t until my family moved to the nearby town of Palmer just after my eleventh birthday that I started writing. The move was traumatic. I had been taken away from all that I had ever known. Just when I thought I knew something of life it was shown that nothing is ever for certain. That was the first time I lost my bearing on reality. Writing was my way of coping with that truth. The mystery of the unknown.

Not surprisingly my passion for magic augmented that same year. It is said that it is just that which we fear the most that we must embrace. I knew nothing of philosophy then, yet it must be human instinct that brought me to embrace the mystery that magic provided. Supported by my father I was brought every week to Bianco’s Bike and Magic Shop in Feeding Hills to meet and learn from the local masters of magic (and buy and repair bicycles…and interesting combination). Perhaps the greatest magic trick of all was performed just two years after moving away when I returned to my hometown, during my first public performance. The shy kid that hardly spoke a word was now in front of the entire third grade class of Warren Community Elementary School performing the impossible. Overcoming introversion; finally expressing the inner dreams of a magical world to an audience of fellow children. Indeed, boldly stepping forward and performing regardless of my shyness was perhaps my first real magic trick. Fourteen years later I can still remember the feeling. Perhaps in a way I still feel it every day.

My readings became bizarre. Man Myth and Magic: the illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural; and The Enchanted World of Wizards and Witches. The magic I had been learning at the time were simply tricks; puzzles disguised as magic. I was in search for the real thing. My writings as result took on deeper subjects; bizarre poetry that to this day I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote them. Frustrated that I was not able to find the mystery that I was looking for I decided to create my own mystery artificially in a theatre program that combined my magic with music and poetry. This theatre production I imagined would perhaps quench my thirst to express this magical world I saw in my mind’s eye. On this subject much was written and drawn up, as I also found great joy in drawing. Pages and pages of notebooks filled with ideas and descriptions of the stage set and themes for this production. Then high school happened.

It is perhaps human nature that once we realize that we want something we want it yesterday. From an early age I knew what I wanted to do, share my passions, my magic, music, poetry, drawings…my art…with the world.  School had gotten in the way of that. Time was not moving fast enough for me so one day I came home from school and put my father’s shotgun to my head and pulled the trigger. Click. Wasn’t loaded. As patient as I may appear on the outside, on the inside I am very anxious. This was true then as it is now. There were no bullets that could save me from waiting so waiting was just what I had to do. Then I fell in love.

I was just fifteen when I first meet Stephanie. We quickly became the best of friends, doing anything and everything together. I was in love, but she said she was not. After high school we went off to college in our own separate ways. I studied music and she I did not know what for we had lost touch. Yet even now, eleven years since the first time I saw her, I can remember her singing and making up songs. She reminded me of my childhood and the magical world in my mind’s eye.

Life has a way of showing us when we’ve gone the wrong way, pushing us to where we really need to be.

College was clearly the wrong choice. I was broke, no money to buy food and living in my van in the Stop & Shop parking lot down by the river. That is how I spent my freshman year at UMASS Dartmouth studying to become a music teacher. A period of that pushed me to transfer closer to my family to study at Westfield State College. Life said that wasn’t enough and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts cut the funding to the Tomorrow’s Teacher’s Scholarship which I had been a recipient. The budget cuts pushed me out of college and into the business of starting my own business. It took only two years till I was ready to become a fulltime magician, performing for birthdays, weddings and bar mitzvahs. I had finally achieved my childhood dream of becoming a professional magician. But I felt something was missing. That’s when Stephanie reappeared.

I was still in love, but she said that she was still not. But we were once again the best of friends and did anything and everything together. She had become the most important thing in my life. Even more important than my dreams of sharing the magical world, for she became my magical world and my biggest most wildest dream. I once had an audition to perform magic on a TV show. I didn’t end up going because I had a better, more important opportunity. I got to drive Stephanie to the airport. We had lost touch for five years but I was more in love than ever before and wanted to take every opportunity I could to be there for her. I’m glad I did. Less than a year and a half later we became engaged to be married.

It happened all very suddenly one summer’s night in 2007. I can’t even begin to explain how it happened, for the very thing that I had wanted with all of my heart and soul yet was always told would never be just all of a sudden fell into my lap without an explanation. The course of my life changed forever that day as I restructured my plans to go back to music school and to abandon the entertainment industry. The life of a magician, after all, is no way to start a family. Abandon one dream for a greater dream; nothing could be more fair, especially if it involved sharing my life with Stephanie. Yet just as suddenly as the course of my life changed that day it changed again just seven days later when Stephanie didn’t wake up.

She passed away on a Wednesday morning. I wore black pants and a gray button up dress shirt, tucked in but with no necktie. It was a cloudy morning with a slight chill in the air so I had my black light rain jacket on with a black hat that most people confuse for a horse riders helmet. I hadn’t expected tragic news that day otherwise I would have worn my black and blue suit. To make up for it I’ve worn it every day since.

That was the second time I lost my bearing on reality. Just when I thought I knew something of life it was shown that nothing is ever for certain. Love, and all that I had ever known of it, had been taken away from me. The move from one reality to another was traumatic. Writing was my way of coping with that truth. The mystery of the unknown.

My writings became bizarre. Philosophical points amounting to immense contradicts about life filled the pages. What resulted is the script for a theatrical production combing my magic, music and poetry that expressed the magical world I see in my mind’s eye. The magical world that was and still is Stephanie. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this production was the long lost and forgotten childhood dream I had written about in my journals all those years ago. While I had become a fulltime magician I had stopped short. It took Stephanie, and the inspiration that she lends, to fulfill that end. On November 1, 2008 at 8PM that dream became a reality at City Stage in Springfield, MA.

It Just Happened the Other Day: A True Story is a story of love, loss and inspired hope to find the light in the dark. The production uses magic, music and poetry to tell this poignant story that has helped audiences heal emotional wounds and find their own light in whatever battle they may find themselves in. Armed now with this message of hope and light I once again have an insatiable thirst to share what I see in my mind’s eye with the world, to boldly step forward and perform regardless of circumstance or criticism. And so it is decided. That is what I shall do.

There is the story of the three frogs sitting on a log. The frog in the middle decided one day that it was time to jump off the log and into the water. So now, how many frogs are left on the log? The obvious answer would be two, but sadly there are still three frogs left on the log; for the frog in the middle only decided that it was time to jump into the water, but never actually acted on his decision.

Life has a way of showing us when we’ve gone the wrong way, pushing us to where we really need to be.

With the one year anniversary of that achievement I am now broke, with no money for food and am about to once again be homeless. Clearly I am not where I am supposed to be and am now being pushed out of my living situation to go to where I am supposed to be. Some may say that it is now time to go back to music school and become a music teacher. Others may say to go get a real job to make some money. Some may say join the military or a monastery or a commune or a cult. But I say none of this will do, for I feel my spirit once again speaking to me. The human instinct is once again asking me to embrace that which I fear the most: the unknown. This time in the form of a journey.

In college I wrote a short story called A Visit with Time. It told the story of a young girl who, as it is later revealed, had a visit with her older self. The experience rather alarmed her older self, for she recalled that in her youth she had met an old decrepit woman and, realizing it was actually herself, it caused her to lose her bearing on reality and time. In that story I coined the term journeyride.

Just before Stephanie went off to college she wrote in my year book, quoting from one of her favorite movies Forrest Gump, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get…I hope you get the world. Love Stephanie.” What’s interesting to point out is that her pen began to die at the end so the last few words became faint…but that’s just a symbolic foreshadow of things to come, just as everything else that happens I suppose. Is it possible to touch humanity is such a way that the course of the world and life on planet Earth is forever better? If so the answer is found in the words of Mother Teresa, “We cannot do great things; rather we can only do little things with great love.” And also the words of the Dali Lama, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” After all, people may doubt the things that we say but they will believe the things that we do. Life has a way of showing us the way, like a magic shop/bicycle shop…an interesting combination.

It is a common theme in many cultures from Native American to African villages, that at a certain point in an individual’s life he or she must go through a journey into the dark night of the woods, or sit in a smoldering hot teepee, or even perform a pilgrimage of some sort. It is said that during this journey a transformation takes place for the individual. A spiritual awakening perhaps. Whatever it is, nature also shows similar experiences for its creatures. The water bug just before it goes through the metamorphosis to become a dragon fly, or the caterpillar in the chrysalis stage. There is a time when the caterpillar is no longer a caterpillar, but it’s also not yet a butterfly, reminiscent of Britney Spears’ song “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.” It is just during this time of great change that we leave all that we’ve ever known for a new reality. But we know it’s coming, now reminiscent of the end of the world prophecies of 2012. But let us not look at it so literally as I had done as a silent child, rather as a symbolic foreshadow of things to come, just as everything else has been. So, too, is this journey into the dark night.

I have decided to jump off my log into the water to share the magical new world that Stephanie helped me to see in my mind’s eye, yet I have not yet acted on this decision. Now life, in its infinite wisdom, is pushing me, quite literally kicking me off my log, by taking away my resources to stay here. Taking away my resources to be content to be comfortable. Without comfort and content all humans seek to improve life in some way. I am reminded of Steve Job’s popular speech and his last few words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” I am hungry. I am foolish. Literally. I have no choice now but to now act on my decisions. Some say that with such an absurd unconventional dream surely there must be another way; but another other way would be contradictory to my values, and I refuse to prostitute my values and morals for comfort.

We never truly know why we imagine such things until the day that a few key pieces of the puzzle fills in the spaces between our dreams and reality, revealing a picture that’s always been there yet not yet ready to be seen.

I have a dream of going on a bicycle ride…as far as my imagination will take me. Not merely a day trip, but a journeyride; lasting days, weeks, months. Perhaps the bicycle is my ticket to freedom; a freedom to finally go to where I was born to go, to become who I was born to be. There are only two ways to find out. Do or don’t. Live or die.

Peace-

Jonas Cain

P.S. Information on the journeyride project will be put up on the website shortly. Please check back soon for updates.