The kind of people I know are the kind of people who ask me, "How can you bear to live without magic? Isn’t your world such a drag?" They’re envious of my having had so many opportunities to disbelieve. They resent me.

I wasn’t born a skeptic. My parents were hippie, tree-spirit-worshipping, extraterrestrial-seeking, tarot-card-reading, aura-tracking free thinkers. By the end of high-school, though, my skepticism was fully formed. My peers bestowed on me the Most Likely to be Admitted to the Cynics Hall of Fame award. I refused to accept it. I am not a cynic. I have a very positive outlook on life. People who need magic, I’ve noticed, tend to be credulous and escapist. It’s because I am able to bear the world that I can be so skeptical.

When I was ten, some friends and I were sitting on my roof when we saw a bright light that we couldn’t explain. It wasn’t a star. It wasn’t a plane. It wasn’t a helicopter. It wasn’t a balloon. It wasn’t a comet. It wasn’t a missile. It wasn’t a satellite. It hovered and dipped and flashed and zoomed. It was a U.F.O., literally; I couldn’t identify it. But it wasn’t a spaceship. Of that, I’m sure.

When I was eleven, I went to YMCA camp. At night our cots rattled and there was high, breathy shrieking. The lights flashed on and off. It was said that, twenty years before, a counselor had been murdered in our bunk by her jealous boyfriend who had caught her with another man. The best I could do was to blame bizarre weather. Most of the other campers demanded to go home. What good is it, I want to know, to let superstitions ruin your summer?

On my fifteenth birthday, my mother took me to see a clairvoyant friend of hers. "She’s amazing," I was told. "She predicted your birth. She predicted the big earthquake. She’s predicted the winners of the past five presidential elections. She’s helped the police locate serial killers. She always wins the contests where you guess the number of beans in a jar." Her name was Madame June. She told me that I would go gray by twenty-five. She told me that I would break my leg skiing before I was thirty. She told me I would marry a woman whose name began with an L. She told me to watch out for orange cats. She told me to become a policeman. It’s true that I’m gray-haired. I did break my leg. Should I dump my girlfriend because her name is Tina? We’ve been together for nearly four years and she’s pretty incredible….

My friend Sarah, whose parents are friends of my father and are from the same group of hippie, tree-spirit-worshipping, extraterrestrial-seeking, tarot-card-reading, aura-tracking free thinkers, prays every night for a preternatural experience.

"Whom do you pray to?" I once asked her.

"Everything and all," she said. "God is in each of us and everything is God."

"If God is part of you, why do you need to pray?" I asked. She rolled her eyes and spat poison.

Why am I friends with people like that? Why are they friends with me?

I love my sofa. I love my cat. I love my girlfriend. I love my hands. I love the sidewalk. I love the trees. I love working hard. I love payday. I love everything and everyone, and they’re all real.

Maybe someday a dragon will walk through my door. I’d probably believe it was a lizard. But, what a wonderful lizard it would be!