We had a spaghetti dinner last night with our son and his family at our house, and--as always after they've been over--I felt as if I'd been worked over by a mobster.
Oh, don't get the wrong idea ... it was tremendous fun, and no one really worked anyone else over. It's just that at my age, well, things can be ... more difficult.
Our older grandson (in 8th grade) has been making a difficult decision about high school. And our younger grandson (about to turn 10) is reading his way through the Rowling novels about Harry Potter. He's well into the fourth one now (The Goblet of Fire), and he is reading copies of the books that I had read back in 2007.
I've written about this before--but just a quick reminder: I had not read any of the Potter novels when the final one came out in 2007. But when we saw the enormous queue at the local bookshop, when we saw little kids carrying fat books as if they were precious gems (which, of course, they are), and when the cultural imperative to read them became, well, overwhelming, I read them.
Rowling published the first one in 1997, the year I retired from middle school teaching, and if I had still been teaching when this new star rose in the sky, I would have read it, right along with the kids. I often did that: saw what kids were reading, then read it myself.
Anyway, in the summer of 2007, Joyce was away for a week-long conference somewhere, and I decided to read one Potter a day while she was gone--quite a commitment, I know, because (as I've alluded above--and as you surely know), they are l-o-n-g books.
I loved them. Consumed them like Snickers bars. Cried when it was over.
And so--seeing my younger grandson similarly obsessed, I felt like weeping again. Restrained myself.
He was quizzing me last night--asking me about Potterian names and events that I haven't really thought about in a dozen years. I made him give me clues; then I did pretty well (C or C+).
An odd coincidence ... Chris, a friend, told me I should read the novels Rowling wrote under the name "Robert Galbraith")--detective novels about a P.I. named Cormoran Strike. So ... I downloaded one to my Kindle (the first--The Cuckoo's Calling, 2013), and now I have to confess to Chris that he was ... right. I'm loving it. Loving how she's shaped the genre to accommodate her story.
And ... maybe ... one of these days ... our grandson will wander into those books, too, and find himself, once again, deliriously, delightfully lost.
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