Thank You Joanne

August 26, 2007

Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

In November of 1999, a FedEx truck pulled up to our old house in Beverly and delivered a late birthday present to C, who had just turned 6. I stashed it away, mistakenly thinking it was an early Christmas present.

But late one afternoon--as we were playing in our dark, skanky basement where W, who wasn’t yet 2, liked to line up his endless collection of Matchbox cars along the seam of our ratty futon--C spied the Amazon box with “Happy Birthday C” printed along the bottom of the address label. 

He wrestled it open. Inside was a hardcover book, no, two! from his aunt and uncle in California. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, I read the titles as the books emerged from Amazon’s overkill packaging. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

I had heard about these books; I had read a story in a newsmagazine at the pediatrician’s office about how kids in England had lined up to wait for the third book, which wasn’t yet out in the States. “I think these are supposed to be good,” I told C, though as I flipped through I was worried they’d be too much for him. He was only a few months into kindergarten.

“Read,” C commanded, and so I began, crouched on the stairs with the shag carpeting that made my skin crawl. I read and read. Some hours later, T came home to a dark house and no sign of supper and his family huddled in the basement and gave me a look that said, what, has a bomb gone off? In a way, it had. After we finally got C into bed that night, I kept on reading.

Last night, eight years later, we stopped reading. Even in the heat, all four of us and the dog piled onto our bed and read together to the last two chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. C is now a sprawling teenager, who of course had finished the book 36 hours after it was released, but he deigned to lounge around to hear the ending aloud one more time. I read for a long while, but I made T do the last pages. It was all falling action, all the deaths had already happened, but still. I didn’t trust my voice not to break.

We’re done. All those years of waiting, waiting for the next book, wondering and speculating, dressing up as Harry and Dobby and Mad-Eye, the daytime book-release parties, and later, as the boys got older, the midnight parties and then staying up all night just reading reading reading.

One summer, C and I snuck around the house, meeting up in odd corners to read a page or two because W, who wasn’t old enough to follow, would scream “No Harry No Harry” whenever he saw the book appear. The next book out, C was reading on his own and W was the one hearing it aloud. He’d caught the worst case I’ve ever seen of poison ivy, and I remember so clearly sitting beside him as he floated in an Aveeno oatmeal bath, holding his hands between my own as I read so he wouldn’t scratch. 

Now it’s over. I feel so lucky my kids got to be there, got to see--live out--what a couple of books still had the power to do in the early years of the new century. It’ll never happen quite that way again.

So thanks for that, Ms. Rowling. I’m glad you’re richer than the Queen. You deserve it.