Unfortunately, I hadn’t calibrated our position in the book with our holiday meal. As the sky darkened and my husband and his mother brought our Thanksgiving meal to the table, Eli and I reached the end of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” which — no spoilers! — chillingly details one of the most upsetting climaxes in modern American literature, young adult or otherwise.
When Eli came to the table, he was dripping tears into his turkey. Every few moments, he let out a fresh wail. When I said, consolingly, that the long weekend would give us time to watch the accompanying film, he shook his head.
“Then I’ll have to live through it twice,” he sniffled.
Did I feel guilty that I had ruined Thanksgiving? Yes. Was it nevertheless one of the highlights of my parenting life to date? Also yes.
He had become so absorbed in the story, so devoted to a fictional character that he felt compelled to grieve for him, and I couldn’t have been prouder.
I’ve been a Harry Potter fan since I was 17 and my friends and I persuaded our participatory democracy teacher Mr. Moskowitz to let us read an excerpt to the class from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” for...reasons I can’t recall. It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve been waiting Eli’s whole life to read the books with him.
But for a long time, he was resistant and I was hesitant — first, because he was too young, and then, because I was nervous that he wouldn’t love them the way I did and I would be disappointed.
Because I love the Harry Potter books — I mean, I really, really love them. I’ve read the entire series, at minimum, a dozen times. (That’s a conservative estimate.) Every time, there’s something new and magical in the experience.
Before Eli and I read the series together, I had never read the books aloud before. I worked on perfecting my character voices (Snape was the easiest; just do a full-on imitation of Alan Rickman and draw...out...every...syllable) and pronouncing tongue-twisting spells. Every time Gryffindor won a Quidditch match, Eli would pump his fist. When a Death Eater smashed Neville’s nose during the battle in the Department of Mysteries at the end of the fifth book, Eli was so upset he shouted his first legitimate swear word. When he took the Sorting Quiz on Pottermore and was Sorted into Hufflepuff, he embraced his Hufflepuff pride with aplomb. On Halloween, if we passed anyone wearing a Hogwarts costume, he’d shout out, “Hey Gryffindor! I’m a Hufflepuff!”
When we started the series, we were following a standard one-chapter-per-day schedule. But Eli soon demanded what felt like round-the-clock readings of Harry Potter; in the morning, he would follow me to the kitchen and insist that I keep reading as I made my coffee, and during the ending of a particularly memorable chapter I had to read to him as we walked to school.
When I was a kid, reading was my thing, my identity. I prided myself on checking out the maximum number of books allowed from the library (at the time it was 25) and packing an extra vacation bag especially for books. (Pre-Kindle!) I bragged that my father was a librarian and would cancel all my late fees. (Thanks, Dad.) No one had a smartphone (no one even had a dumbphone, for that matter). No one was a YouTube star. Reading was what I had.
In early December, just as we were embarking on our final reckoning with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” we got an invitation to attend the “Star Student” awards at Eli’s school. In kindergarten and in first grade, Eli’s award was for “effort,” which I always assumed was code for “tries hard at being a pain.” But this year, he was recognized as an...Avid Reader!
Eli is such a firecracker of a kid. Much of the time, I’m wondering how he and I can possibly be related, let alone how on earth I could have spawned him. But that night, the evidence spoke for itself. I had successfully produced a fellow Avid Reader!
On the first Friday night of winter vacation, I told Eli we were going to stay up late and read the three most pivotal chapters in the climax of “Deathly Hallows”: The Prince’s Tale, The Forest Again and King’s Cross. We turned off the lights in the living room and he lay on his gigantic puppy pillow so he could bury his face in it when tears came. When we came to I open at the close...I didn’t so much read the words as weep them.
Just as Dumbledore tells Snape that Harry's deepest nature is more like his mother's, I've always felt that Eli's deepest nature is more like his father's. They've bonded over various shared interests: Legos, video games, fencing, terrible 99-cent pizza. This is, perhaps, the first time I've loved something so deeply and convinced Eli to love it too.
Last night, Eli said to me, "Mom, we need a new series." I was so tickled. A new series, a new adventure for us to embark on together as Avid Readers.
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