Magic and a toy cement mixer

David Foster Wallace died last year, but New Yorker has recently published a wonderful short story by him. It touches on magic and religious feeling, and I'll leave the rest for your own interpretation. The story is titled All That, and here is a brief excerpt from the middle of the story:

The toy cement mixer is the origin of the religious feeling that has informed most of my adult life. The question, which I (sadly) never did ask, was what my father proposed to do with the Tooth Fairy if he were ever successful in catching it. Possibly, though, another cause for the sadness was that I realized, on some level, that my parents, when they watched me trying to devise schemes for observing the drum’s rotation, were wholly wrong about what they were seeing—that the world they saw and suffered over was wholly different from the childhood world in which I existed. I wept for them far more than any of the three of us knew at the time.

Read the full story here.