They're just wild about Harry's magic

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 6, 2000

You have somebody in your life like this.

People who are sure they know everything there is to know, and are happy to tell you, about the latest in mutual funds, computer games, cheap air fares, CDs, artsy movies, hot colors in house paint.

I can never decide if these people are sheep or if I'm sleepwalking through life.

You'll get my point when I say I went to my first, and only, Grateful Dead concert when I was in my mid-30s, and was the only person in the stadium who wasn't stoned out of his mind and didn't know the words to all the songs.

Either I missed out on big trends or signed on as they fizzled: think of tie-dyed shirts, disco dancing, customized vans, The Simpsons, techno music. I can't distinguish the anorexic starlets in People. Either they look alike or the same agent concocted their silky, upper crust names.

For a long time I even refused to wear running shoes for purposes other than running. Since I wasn't a runner, what good were shoes that made my size 91/2 feet look so much like steroid-steeped marshmallows that the rest of me should have been stepping out of the lunar landing module?

I also turn down all invitations to join book clubs. They contain the worst sort of the terminally with-it, those with literary pretensions.

So for a long time I was clueless about Harry Potter.

I have learned, however, that Harry Potter has a secret, Mafia-type organization, and friends of mine, even blood relatives, are card-carrying members.

These are intelligent people, with multiple degrees, multiple children, occupations that have them trying to make the world a better place. They are not the typical reader for the category that the Harry Potter books, by the Scottish writer J.K. Rowling, are usually put in, juvenile fiction. They are in the target market for self-help books on the midlife crisis.

But they are bonkers for Harry Potter, and they have been putting the squeeze on me.

They are among the millions who have ordered the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and if it doesn't come in the mail on time Saturday, they will die. Just die. You can hear it in their voices. They know all the funny names of the characters, all the inside dope, from reading the three previous Potter books.

And they gasp with disbelief, and I suspect, disdain, when I say I have not read Harry Potter.

But your child! they say. I explain how it is true that she's brilliant, but not yet into whole paragraphs, let alone pictureless books. What a cheap trick it is, to bring up my child. It's me they're after. Me they want to improve. And they have my number. They know I'm a sucker for such appeals.

So I went out Wednesday and bought a copy of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I got as far as page 88, as 11-year-old orphaned Harry prepares to leave his miserable existence in the closet under the stairs of the home of his fat, dumb cousin for wizard school. Then I went on the Internet and found out that Rosie O'Donnell might be in the movie that's of course in the works. I know who she is. She's the one who is not anorexic.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is a fast read. The enemy is crystal clear, and magic intervenes to end crises, ease pain.

I can see why adults like Harry Potter as much as kids. In grown-up life, the enemy is sometimes you, and crises and pain do not evaporate with a wand like Harry's, "made of holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches, nice and supple," as the wandmaker told him.

But I wax serious. How un-Harry of me. Harry is about escape. He is also a madness of international proportions in which, as usual, I lag behind. I'll still be on the first book as the Potter nuts of my acquaintance burn their way through the fourth.

I will say this much for the Potter nuts I know. They have been kind enough not to call me a Muggle. If you don't know what that is, go get one of these books.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.