Harry Potter: The Fad That Lived
Last night, as I stood in line to see the last Harry Potter movie, I found myself thinking back to my first Harry Potter book. The first time I saw the books, they were a stack in between the children’s section and the adult’s. My mother offered to buy it for me, because the fancy display was eye-catching, but I turned it down for the complete anthology of Edger Allan Poe and a compendium of classic poetry. I was nine.
Come to the next Christmas, and we were having the annual Christmas party, the sort where everybody buys a gift under a certain limit, wraps them, numbers them, and drops them in a box. Then you pick a number out of a hat and that’s your gift. I picked and was thrilled when I felt books under the wrapping. I was severely disappointed when I saw it was a stack of American Girl novels. I had no interest in them. Another girl came to sheepishly explain that that gift had been meant for another girl, and that she thought she had numbered it correctly that the other girl would be infinitely grateful, if only I would exchange gifts with her. I decided that I would rather have just about anything else, and thus Harry Potter fell into my hands.
And now the last movie is out, and the series is done. Except that it isn’t. When J. K. Rowling set pen to paper she wove a timeless spell with a deep, unbreakable magic. I have seen fads come and go, but this isn’t a fad. This is classic being made, one that will one day eclipse new, flashy books in the hearts of little bibliophiles everywhere. This is a book that we have spent our lives on. I’ve personally spent eleven years sitting up all night waiting for the book to be released. And though they never had flash bodies of their own I cried when I lost old friends as though they had. I sat in a sold out theater like so many millions around the world last night, and as spells burst across the night sky I know that we were as one when our hearts leapt into our mouths.
Last night the theater was packed with young children, and for once I wasn’t horrified that their parents let them out to see a movie. For once I didn’t roll my eyes and lament the fall of something great into the hands of today’s youth. Instead I smiled at them and they smiled back, because both knew what we were there for. We both knew that in ten years or twenty, we will still be reading this to our children, and then to theirs. We know that children who want to dress as wizards for Halloween will still think of their houses before dressing up. And we know that in ten years or twenty children will still wait up on their eleventh birthday, searching the skies for an owl with a letter.
