Cartwheels You Used To Turn

I am prone to random bouts of bittersweet nostalgia. 

I’ll be sitting with my wife and kids watching TV, and suddenly it’s five years ago; the room is louder, brighter in its way, sitting on that thin line between delightful and annoying. I put away the Christmas decorations and for a moment realize that we’re within a few years of Santa Claus tipping his jaunty cap and vanishing from our family mythology. 

I have no regrets, except that there has been no substantial effort toward effective time travel, or at the very least, a mechanism to keep my kids at age 7 for at least three to five years. 

“The Death of Magic Thinking” is about that moment of loss and possibility when you stop being a child and start being a kid, soon to be a tween, and eventually a dreaded teenager. Costello writes about the moment from a few points of view; the early verses reflect back on youth, but there’s a gutting shift in POV to a narrator leaving his own child behind at school (“Walked you to the prison gate…”). EC also focuses on an early moment of intimacy that left its own impression on the narrator. 

It’s interesting that he attributes this youthful moment to creative awakening, while later in the song, he seems to suggest school as a place where the creative mind of a child goes to die. Maybe I’m not giving the narrator enough credit but it’s hard to find the middle ground between “school” and “prison” here. 

(There’s something a bit reductive, even clumsy, about EC’s attitude specifically toward school in “Magic Thinking.” It’s easy to say from a certain remove that school somehow eliminates our childrens’ ability to wonder and create. But as the husband of a teacher, I gotta stan for the power of education, even if it puts me at odds with the little hands of concrete. A good teacher makes wonder and creativity a central part of learning.) 

The second half of the song is where the rubber meets the emotional road. EC captures perfectly that feeling of helplessness that comes when you pat your kid on the back lightly and send them forward into their own independent existence.

At first, it’s insane to consider this little being who was attached to your hip suddenly having full days where they’re navigating the world around them totally alone. They’re with teachers, but they’re still reacting solely as the sum total of whatever you’ve managed to pump into their tiny brains through board books and osmosis. You’re desperate to know what you can never really know—that they’re doing okay out there, and whatever you’ve done to prepare them, it was enough.

And then, if it’s not reading too much into it, Costello seems to end up where his own twin teenaged sons have arrived, the moment when your kids totally detach from your orbit and enter into their own. 

We all know most kids don’t disappear from your life forever; you let go in stages, then all at once. Eventually the little monsters always arrive back home. But we don’t get that reminder in “Magic Thinking.” Instead, it’s the bittersweet nostalgia that lingers.