Moondew

I walked outside tonight, just to the curb. The moon was full. Fitting, I think, for the opening night of the last Harry Potter movie. There, on the sidewalk, I took a step back. Thirteen inches back, thirteen years. There was a day, I know, in 1998 when I looked at the full moon. It was around that time that I had begun to read the first Harry Potter book. Through the years, I read all of them, and watched all of the movies.

I am not at the premier tonight, trudging through the quagmire of kids who picked up the series once they were old enough. I am here, on this sidewalk. The one where I played four square when book two was published. Where I rollerbladed when book four hit the shelves. Where I sat, in the fading light of a summer afternoon, as I read the last pages of book seven. There are critics who call out this technicality and question that detail in the story. But Harry and I grew up together. We were the same age from the beginning. Those books, unlike any other, conjured the most vivid depictions in my imagination. Like magic.

Most friends, you know, you talk to from time to time. Some of them drift away from you. You don't really notice, at first. But then, at some offhanded remark, or for no reason at all, it occurs to you that you haven't heard from them in ten years. But the conclusion of the Potter series was like the severing of a very good friendship in an instant. I knew how their lives played out. I knew they were gone as I flipped the last page.

The moon is particularly round. I never recall the edge around its circumference being so defined. Like it was drafted with some celestial compass. It seems that every time I look at the moon, something has changed since the last time. Somebody died from cancer. Or in a car accident. Or something else terrible. Even all of the good things you've experienced have a melancholy sort of aura to them, tokens irretrievably fed to the slot machine. Whenever I take time to sit still, time takes me. Everything that ever happened in that particular spot--even the most trivial things--I can remember. I know all of the cars that have parked here by my driveway. My grandfather's Buick, and the Buick he had before that…he's gone now. I can see the old trees growing in the front yard, and then falling and being cut up, and then the new trees growing. Coat after coat of paint on the house. I see everything, remember everything.

If the Harry Potter stories had nothing else going for them, they in the very least held up a mirror for me as I've torn through the years. I watched Harry and his friends grow up, and became much more conscious of my own maturation. I think I learned to savor who I was at the time. Kids, you know, always want to be older--they want to have more freedom. Can't wait 'till they can sit in the front seat, 'till they can use the taller sink, 'till they can drive a car, 'till they can drink legally. Then, of course, we trip and fall off the end of the dock, cursing the haste with which we ran towards the dark, cold water of the real world. In a way, it's good for them to have something to look forward to. But reading Rowling's masterpieces helped me understand that although I couldn't do everything I wanted, I was on the greener side of a field that I would regret running through too quickly, if I did so.

I don't know where I'm going. If you sit down with a topic in mind, with a very clear outline, and a thesis and all of the other elements your high school english teachers required you to use, you would theoretically produce a concise piece of writing. But that isn't always realistic. Veritably, the outlines in your life are often scrambled by some depth charge of reality. Sometimes, writing by free association is a better sampling of how things really work.

Richard Harris passed away after the second movie--he was the first Dumbledore. I loved the Harris Dumbledore. Although he was just a one and a half hour presence on the movie screen in front of me when I watched the first film, I felt comforted by him somehow. The same was the case when I read the books. He had a wise, grandfatherly sort of presence that put me at ease. Dumbledore is dead. Harris is dead. Both of my grandfathers are dead. But there up in the sky, is the moon. It seems to offer the same sort of security that they all did. Maybe it is my best friend, for life. I think it is for all of is--it was there, after all, before we were, and it isn't switching planets anytime soon.

I can see the Sea of Tranquility; a moment ago it was cloaked in fog. Sometimes in life, the understanding of what to do next is temporarily obscured like that. It changes as abruptly as the marine layer does, carried by a low-altitude midnight breeze. There it goes again. It's blinking.

I'll go and see the last movie at some point. Really, the story ended for me with the last page in the book. I'm sure watching 7.2 will reignite some of the things that I felt as I closed the back cover. Regardless, the legend of Harry Potter is one in which I am glad I got to partake. Although I'm not eating an eight pound bucket of popcorn drenched in three quarts of margarine, while watching the movie premiere with several hundred of my closest friends, I feel perfectly satisfied at present with what J.K. Rowling has given me. Now that it's all over, it's just me, here on this sidewalk. Me, and the ghosts of the past thirteen years. And the moon.

Current Mood: Reminiscent

Listening To: "Spirit of '76" by The Alarm