Hey, Mom, want to see an amazing trick?

So when I was a kid, maybe 7 or so, living in Sheridan, Wyoming in the mid 1950s, I ordered a magician kit for $1.00. I found an ad like the one at the left at the back of a comic book, Superman, or Batman, or Spiderman, I don't really remember that part. You may have seen these ads: you could mail-order a Daisy BB rifle for $3.98, and the X-ray specs for a dollar were a tantalizing choice allowing you to see through clothing, but for that one I couldn't count on getting to the mail before my mother did so that was always thought to be too risky, or the Put on 50 lbs. of Muscle ad for $3.98, or the special Hypno-Coin you could get for sending $1 to a New York post office box number and hypnotize your friends. There were usually money back guarantees. The magic ad in question was something like "How to Be a Magician and Amaze your Friends." I cobbled together $1.00 somehow, from my lunch money, or chore earnings, or snatching coins from the top of Dad's dresser which, by the way, I always found to be a good source of income. One way or another, I came up with the amount and put the coins in an envelope, and mailed it to the address. Eventually, I received a few mimeographed sheets of paper describing a few magic tricks: the amazing ketchup trick, a card trick or two, and some others I don't remember involving sleight-of-hand, and the one I am writing about: the Amazing Disappearing Nickel Trick. The Amazing Disappearing Nickel Trick involves placing a nickel in your palm after holding it up and letting a viewer verify that it is, indeed, an actual nickel. Take your other hand and place it over the nickel cupping both hands so that the middle is hollow. Carefully manipulate the nickel so that it is held inside by your two thumbs which you then bring up to your mouth. And now the trick part. You pretend to blow through your thumbs into your cupped hands and, magically, the nickel disappears, you open your hands and the nickel is gone. The trick part is that prior to blowing on your hands you do a big dramatic inhale during which you suck the nickel into your mouth. Now, there's a trick to this trick, and the trick is to not inhale the nickel too much so that it goes down your windpipe, closes off your breathing, you pass out, and then you die. It does seem that my siblings and I narrowly averted deathly disaster on more than one occasion. Me and the nickel, me and the hospital stay after the bicycle crash, my brother and his bicycle crash into the car, and my other brother and the "I wonder what gasoline tastes like" afternoon, my one sister and the stone-lined rapidly moving water irrigation ditch into which she fell and into which the Girl Scout leader also jumped and snatched her out. My youngest sister seems to have avoided such incidents that I know of. So back to the Amazing Disappearing Nickel Trick. As I was only seven or so, completely unaware of my own mortality, not very cognizant of what could possibly go wrong with any particular action or activity in which I took part, an example being jumping from some unhealthy height out of the back yard tree with mother's umbrella to use as a parachute. That did not work very well and ruined my mother's umbrella.

Anyway, I vigorously inhaled that nickel which sucked right into my windpipe, blocking my breathing. Fortunately, I was doing this trick for the first time for my mother in the kitchen of the church parsonage, a small bungalow on tree-lined Coffeen Avenue. My mother apparently noted right away as I grabbed my throat, flailed, and presumably started to turn blue. I'm thinking it was my mother who grabbed my ankles, inverted me upside down, and tried to shake that nickel out of my throat. But it could have been my dad. Mother thinks it was my dad. I can still see the linoleum floor rising and falling in front of my upside-down-turned face. My memory says the floor was green with yellow flecks, but I could be wrong about that. The rest of that story is lost to my memory, but eventually, in the kitchen, or a doctor's office, or the hospital, that nickel made its way or was forced down because it couldn't be retrieved, passed down into my stomach, through my digestive tract, and finally out. For the next several days or weeks, we were instructed to search through my poo, which involved putting a pie plate in the toilet, to find that offending nickel. It did pass, we did sort through my poo to find it, a red letter day to be sure, and I had that discolored nickel for many years. It was not discolored before it passed through my entire digestive system. Probably because of the many moves my family made in subsequent years, it eventually disappeared for good.