“What? Nothing.”
I gathered myself; I pulled down my cheeks to force them into a frown. Do not smile! Do not laugh! That will ruin everything!
Then, near the very end of the book, a character that is close to Harry does something for him that is very nice, something that really drives the point home that Harry is an orphan, that he’s alone in this world, but that he’s not alone because everyone looking out for him.
See, the problem was, I had read ahead in the series. I knew this sad, touching moment was coming. And looking at my kids’ faces, I knew how it would affect them. And so I had a new problem: call me a big sissy, but instead of laughing during the reading, I had to fight back tears.
Man, I thought, wiping at my eyes, this is some serious pressure!
When we finished, my daughter said to my son, “Did you see? Dad was crying.”
Fast forward to very recently: we were coming up on the ending of the second novel in the series, Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets.
I thought, “Hey, I need to relieve this mounting pressure I feel to read the climax just right. I’ll take the kids to the park, and we’ll be outside, which will distract me and help me perform a solid reading of the material.”
So we went to the park and settled on a sloping, grassy hill. The sky was blue. The whole thing was very serene—for a short time.
For some reason, when you are reading to your children on a hill in a park, this seems to be an invitation for people to come up to you and be annoying. Throughout the reading of the final chapters of the book, while my daughter occasionally tore grass out of the ground and tossed it, casually, onto my face, we had to deal with:
1) A family that decided to sit down nearby, including two bullying brothers who seemed to believe they could fight with each other more effectively if they were standing right next to us;
PREVIOUS PAGE
