Nostalgic moment

After a busy couple of months, I am (finally) starting to think about summer vacation. Malcolm has been out of school since the beginning of May, but it isn't really summer yet. Not really. Since a trip overseas isn't in the cards this year, there is really only one place I want to go, one of the rituals of my childhood that I want to share with him - backpacking on the Olympic Peninsula.

This is the place I think of as part of home, even though I usually only went there once a summer for three or four days at a time. It is my happy place that I go to in my mind when I need to be somewhere else. And it is the one thing I miss most, living way out here in Arkansas. Yes, I miss my parents and childhood home and all that, but I can keep in touch with them, I visit them regularly. The beach is much harder to get to - a ferry ride, a several hour drive (long stretches of which used to be on gravel roads), a hike through the woods. It isn't somewhere you can just drop in on a whim in the afternoon, like a city park. The journey is part of the experience, part of the shedding and then regaining of normal life that makes it so special.

So this summer, I am hopeful that I can take Malcolm there, to see the endless stretch of the ocean at the edge of the continent, to play in the cold ocean, to get sand in his hair, toes, teeth, ears. To eat simple camping food around a fire after a day of running and hiking and digging. To see the stars without the lights of the city dimming them.

What the heck, my Harry Potter Memories

It seems that everyone else is doing it, so I might as well join in. Since this weekend is the premier of the final Harry Potter movie, the interwebs are aflame with stories of how Harry Potter and friends changed lives. There is a touching letter sent by a fan to J.K. Rowling; there are stories about how Hermione should be the real star of the series; there are stories about how today's young adults grew up alongside Harry and what it means now that both book series and movie series are finished.

My Harry memories start around the time I went to Scotland in 1999 to study for a semester at St.Andrews University.  The books were gaining buzz, and I, being perverse, decided that I was not interested in them, since everyone else seemed to thing they were the bees knees. Then, I reasoned, if I have to read them, at least I will wait until I read them properly - in the British editions, not the stupid American ones where they have to change all the slang and descriptions of jumpers to sweaters.  I finally read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (and yes, that is how is should be - sorcerer's stone my foot!) in a few hours while staying at the house of one of my flat mates for a weekend. I was staying in her little sister's room, and that sister had the first three books there. As soon as I finished the first one, I also devoured the second one - I am pretty sure I ignored the family and stayed up way too late. I didn't have time to read the third before it was time to leave, but I did managed to stop at a bookshop in Edinburgh on my way back to St. Andrews and buy all three. I read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on the bus ride back, in the dark and rain, crammed in like a sardine.

I was back at Whitman when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out. Since I had the first three in the British edition, and can't stand it when things don't match, I ordered my copy from Amazon.co.uk, which meant I had to wait a few extra days before I could read it. Benjamin took that copy on fire with him that summer, and when I got it back, the edges were stained with ash.

I don't have any particular memories about books 5 and 6, apart from again ordering them from Britain, to make sure my set was complete.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. By this point, Benjamin and I had agreed to read the final book together, as we do many other books. This one was painful though, in so many ways. I do most of the reading aloud, and there were certainly times I choked up. At some point, maybe half way, we were desperate to reach the end, so we sat down on the bed and started reading. Every time we reached a chapter end, we couldn't stop. We ended up reading for 5 hours straight. By the end, I could hardly talk, my voice was going, and we were both crying.  I haven't gone back to read it since then, but I am sure I will still cry whenever I do.

I never camped out or attended a release party, nor did I ever dress up as a character. And I have no feelings one way or the other about the movies, although I will certainly go see the final one, eventually. They are fun to see, if a little uninspired. But that is pretty much par for the course for me - I am not touched by pictures on a screen and special effects - it is the power of words and my own imagination working together that hit the hardest.  And that, for me, is the greatness of Harry Potter - no, the story isn't completely original (I mean, orphan boy struggles against great odds, where have you heard that before - everywhere), there are gaps in the world-building that leave a perfectionist like me irritated - but as a whole, it sucks you in. There are so many stories of kids who hated to read becoming readers just because of Harry Potter. And that is magic.

I feel grown up...

I feel like I am really grown up, because I was born before the 1990s and can remember life before Clinton was president (unlike most or any of Benjamin's students) and I remember the debate about beta and VHS, but every once in a while I find something that makes me feel really young. For instance, I am reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, and at the moment he is talking about the adoption of bar codes and the UPC - it didn't happen universally until the mid-late 1980s. I can't imagine shopping without bar codes. Yikes. I guess it makes sense that they wouldn't be seen as a time saver until computers were widespread, but then, I can't really remember life without a computer. Since my dad is a computer programer, and has been since the late 1960s, computers have always been in my consiousness. What will my (hypothetical, future) children use as time and memory markers?

Grasshopper memories

This little green grasshopper was resting on my catnip plant yesterday morning. I love grasshoppers - especially trying to catch them. When I was small and Mom and I would visit my great-grandfather at his farm in Nebraska, he and I would go out and catch them. He would point them out with his cane, and I would pounce on them. I always loved fluttery feeling of a grasshopper in your hand, trying to escape. I would usually let them go - the thrill was in the catch more than anything. I still get that thrill - on our recent hike I managed to catch a couple, although I seem to have slowed down and am no longer so close to the ground as I was at 7.