Accio your attention!
Did you don your school robes and grab your wand to attend yesterday’s Harry Potter day just so you could hold on to the magic for a little longer? I definitely did.
On July 15, my childhood slipped away as a movie’s credits rolled. You should know what I’m talking about — Harry Potter. The Boy Who Lived has been with me probably for more than half my life. So when he vanished from the big screen, a little part of my childhood disapparated with him.
For a while, my ringtone was the Harry Potter theme song, the password to my laptop at home mocked Dumbledore’s candy trend, and a part of me always dreamed an owl would deliver my messages rather than a text or a tweet.
Harry Potter is a lot more than a fictitious boy wizard who waves a wand and whispers “Wingardium Leviosa.” He was Professor Potter who taught our generation a great many lessons.
To start, I was in middle school when the first book arrived in a basket on my doorstep. At a time plagued with video games and Nickelodeon TV shows, I was curled up under my invisibility cloak reading Harry Potter.
And I’m not alone; a lot of us college-age students were doing the same. J.K. Rowling roused our entire generation to read a book double the size of anything on our bookshelves usually crowded with Junie B. Jones and Captain Underpants. I stayed up long past my 9 p.m. bedtime with “Lumos” and “Nox” always on the tip of my tongue so my parents couldn’t pull a Filch.
As we aged and matured, Harry did too. In The Sorcerer’s Stone, we enjoyed our silly, childish phase with him. As the wizarding world went forward in time, ours did too, propelling us from childhood into adulthood.
The last two books were stained with death, responsibilities and grief — all mature traits we couldn’t handle when we were younger. Not to mention, we all grew out of our “ugly phase” the same time Harry became somewhat cute, Ron became manly, and Hermione became a figment of men’s imaginations.
So when the last movie debuted, I prepared myself for the pain sure to follow. To make it go away, I saw it again — and again.
But the end doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it actually doesn’t have to signal the end of our childhoods at all. We are very fortunate to have matured at a time graced by Harry Potter’s presence. He taught us to be courageous and adventurous.
I don’t know about you, but I’m making an unbreakable vow to never let those Harry Potter books leave my shelf, no matter where I am. As long as I exist, so does my childhood.
Mischief managed.
Cori Sherman is a senior studying public relations and associate editor of The Post. Look into the Pensieve with her at cs182407@ohiou.edu.
