We Reuned.

There is nothing to make one feel tan and svelte like spending a weekend at the Mall of America, where my maternal family celebrated a reunion.  However, I learned there an important lesson about weight on log flumes.  My brother-in-law went with my nephew, and said I would get just a splash, "Like when you spill water on yourself."  (Yes, this happens more often than I am comfortable admitting.)  However, when my brother-in-law, my sister, my nephew, and I went on the log flume together, we got SOAKED.  Well, let me clarify: I got soaked.  If my sister and brother-in-law got a Methodist baptism, my nephew and I got the full on, Disciples of Christ, believer's dunking.  In the name of the Creator, the Christ, and the Holy SPIRIT of consumerism.  Fortunately, we were in a mall.  So I squished over to Old Navy and bought myself a dry outfit; I'd been wanting a pair of goucho pants anyway.

Lovegood

It is weird that people are dressing up to go see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.  There is, in fact, something definitively creepy about being in one’s mid-twenties and putting on a schoolgirl costume to go see a children’s movie.  However, there is a story behind that utter strangeness for every one of those weirdos.

I have sharply colored memories of my mother handing me the first Harry Potter book as I was finishing sixth grade, just after I turned twelve.  During middle school, that universally awful period through which we all apparently must suffer to become functioning adults,  I followed a bereft tween as he fought against bullying peers and a bullying teacher and the bullying world and found himself able to meet the challenge with a flick of the wand, and found myself with him.  Two days later, when I had devoured the first book, my mother brought home the second, picked up on another lunch hour run to Barnes and Noble, a boon to a child in the shadows of an accomplished, beautiful social butterfly of a sister graduating from high school.  She handed it over with a warning that she would not be buying me a thirty dollar book every week for the rest of the summer.

No matter – by the time I scorched through that second book, and then read them both again, I was ready the following year to buy the third book with my own money on the day it came out.  The books came out more or less once a year, and so as Harry aged, as his emotional maturity grew and his way of understanding the world, its beauty and its evils, became more complex, so did I grow with him.

There are tens of millions of kids – nerds and cool kids alike – who have found a piece of themselves in this series, and at least thousands of us who lived along with Harry, starting at age 11 and coming out at the end, somehow as adults.  Those of us who were born 24 years ago grew up with Harry, and we are coming of age with him.  So I will walk to the theater this evening with my fellow nerds, those of us who could not join the throngs of teenagers at last night’s midnight showing because we had to be at work at 8 this morning.  I will don my Hogwarts uniform (Without telling him why, I asked my housemate if he had a stripey tie I could borrow.  Without blinking, he asked, "What House are you representing?"), to relish the whimsy of being young and alive but also to be representative of a million iconoclasts.  We are not a generation that insists on living in a fantasy, refusing to acknowledge the real world; we are the generation that formed a social justice movement using the inspiration of fantasy to fight real-world evil.  We are not failing to grow up; we have just been waiting for our hero to grow up with us.