I Grew Up With This

I was ten years old when I became a Harry Potter fan. I was a little late to the Potter party, actually. I was adamantly anti-fantasy and refused to even consider reading the books when they first came out, but somehow my mom finally convinced me. We read the first book out loud together, chapter by chapter, before bed each night. When we finished it, we went to the bookstore the next day to get the second one. I was hooked.

By the time we got to the third book I couldn’t wait for my mom and bedtime anymore. I read it myself. One of my all-time favorite memories is of sitting on the couch, the book in front of me, reading the scene where Gryffindor plays for the Quiddich cup. I was literally cheering the characters on as I read, shrieking at Harry to “Get the snitch! Get the snitch!” When he finally did, I threw my fist in the air and shouted, “YES!”

That was the summer of 2000, the year the fourth book came out. I was still on the second or third book, so I didn’t go to buy it at midnight, although I remember people talking about doing so. I didn’t much like the fourth book the first time I read it. I think I was maybe a little too young and too much of it was over my head. But I plowed through it anyway, figuring I would read it again at some point, and it would make more sense.

All of a sudden, it seemed like Harry Potter was everywhere. There were dolls and toys and school supplies. My fifth-grade classmates argued endlessly about which one of them got to be Harry for Halloween. We spent countless recesses speculating about how long it would be until the next book came out and who the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher would be. And I, like so many kids of my generation, was just a little bit upset when I didn’t get a letter inviting me to Hogwarts on my eleventh birthday.

Then the movies came. The first one came out when I was in sixth grade. We went to see it on the day before Thanksgiving, with our relatives who were visiting for the holiday. The second movie came out a year later and we did the same thing. That, of course, was the genesis of Magic Wednesday.

The fifth book finally came out the summer before I was in eighth grade. It had only been three years, but to a kid that’s more like thirty. Everything was different. It felt like it had been forever. That was the first time I went at midnight to get the book. I spent the entire next day reading it. I had read other books in one day, but never with such intensity and fervor. There was something about those characters, that story. I couldn’t just put it down and go do something else for awhile like I could with most books. I needed to know what happened next and as long as there were pages still to be read I couldn’t pry my eyes away.

I was thirteen that summer, and I figured out that if there were three years between the fifth and sixth books, and then three more between the sixth and seventh, that by the time the seventh one came out I would, for the first time, be older than Harry. Thinking about that made life seem so short. Three years suddenly didn’t feel like such a long time after all.

When the sixth book came out, only two years later, we had to get two copies, one for me and one for my sister. We bought them from a small local bookstore and I was always worried that they would run out of copies, so I insisted we get there early so we could get a good spot in line. My sister stayed up all night, something I’ve never been able to do, to finish it.

The fifth movie and the seventh book came out the same year, the summer before my senior year in high school. The fifth movie was the first one we went to see at midnight, except it ended up being more like one in the morning because the projector broke and they had to fix it. When the seventh book came out, I realized that I was only seventeen. I still wasn’t older than Harry. I took that book home and just stared at it for awhile. I couldn’t believe that this was the end of the story that I had loved and talked about and read again and again for seven years. But, I reminded myself, it wasn’t really the end. There were still two more movies, which then became three movies when they decided to split the seventh one into two parts.

Tonight, at midnight, the final movie opens. This is the last midnight event. There will never be another one. Today on my university campus I overheard a girl, probably about my age, describing the t-shirt she had made to wear to the movie. Apparently her mom thought she was too old for such things. “I don’t care,” she said. “I grew up with this.”

It’s true. We really did grow up with Harry Potter. When I started reading the books, Bill Clinton was still president, you could go right up to the gate in the airport to meet people coming off the plane, iPods didn’t exist, and today’s ten-year-old Harry Potter fans hadn’t even been born yet. The whole world is different. We’re different. But a tiny part of us, the part that wants to stay up half the night to watch a movie that we already know the ending to, hasn’t changed at all.