Last night I threw two granola bars, my meter, my phone, a wallet, a pen, my writer's notebook and the book I am supposed to have finished for Tuesday's class into a totebag and drove off into the summer dark towards Barnes and Noble. You see, I wished to witness a Harry Potter midnight release party at least once before the series ended. This also would be my son's first release. Last month I reserved a copy of the book for me, and one for him. I have always intended to begin accumulating books to be held in trust for him. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince would be the first such book I purchased.

To get one's books you first had to check in and submit to being banded. Two bands = permission to pay for two books after midnight. My original intent was to get the bands, go home and watch the season premier of Fargate, and then return in time to bring my son to the end of the release party.

So, that was the original plan. I did manage to get a parking spot at Barnes and Noble, and from there I could tell I was a complete rookie when it came to midnight release parties. There were pre-teens camped out on stadium blankets playing cards. There was a particularly persistent clutch of nine year old boys attempting to fling curses and hexes at each other. There were many tall, pointed black hats, black capes, and one memorable young woman dressed as Moaning Myrtle, complete with an actual toilet seat hung around her neck. There were a damn lot of people in the parking lot (entrance to the store was rationed per fire code restrictions). With your bracelets you got a map that told you which LINE you would get into at 11 pm.

Really, I stayed because I doubted I'd find a parking spot sooner, and there were people already in their 11pm lines when I arrived at 8:40pm. I paid my dues in the "wait to just get into the store line", reading the book due on Tuesday and trying not to listen too closely to the 4 fifteen year olds in front of me. They were in their sarcastic mock things phase, but it was fueled more by the exhuberence that comes with the age than a "so what" mentality and I found them to be more tolerable than I would have imagined. Eventually I made it into the building, purchased Carpe Diem, a book about a soccer-mom demon hunter, as a guard against boredom, and got myself a diet pepsi. Ah yes, I made use of the facilities whilst there was still toilet paper.

I retreated to my car, listening to music, reading my text book, and taking the occasional pull of soda. All in all, I wasn't having a bad time. I was alone amongst a thousand people, all of whom had figured out they should go with friends. It was muggy and there was one clearly immortal mosquito inside my car. Didn't really care, although in general I'm not a happy woman in a gathering larger than, say, eight. There was a vibe, an energy, a sense of common purpose that made anything that happened simply part of the experience. Really, how often do we get to be in one place with a thousand other people who are just as exited to read something as you are?

Got in my line at 10:50. Gave up on the text as I needed to have something meaningful to say and there was just too much people watching to do to concentrate. Began Carpe Diem. HP went on sale at 12:01. I was in the car with my two books, green rubber commerative bracelets, poster, and HP glasses (all procured in the last five minutes of my wait) by 12:26. I was in bed and reading by 12:35. Mild shock some two hundred pages into the book when the cat appeared with yet ANOTHER length of craft ribbon hanging from the output end of her digestive system.

After dealing quickly with the cat, I returned to my book. HP 6 went down like honey. The tiresome shouting and angst of the fifth book was gone. This book was clearly going to be "domestic" in that no big event was going to happen that year (well, scheduled, anyway) and most of the story was centered at Hogwarts. I didn't find HP 5 particularly satisfying, but I loved drawing back and savoring the experience of reading and being aware of reading this book.

In the end, I gave up when the sky was beginning to lighten and the dawn birds had begun to sing. Some sleep, a morning spent with my mother, and then I returned to my book, this time downstairs and on the couch, late in the afternoon. I finished just before 7pm. Since book 3 I have always completed them within 24 hours.

So, I cried a bit around quarter to six. It is exceptionally rare for me to cry in general, but I can't even think of the last book that made me cry. I choked up when Harry began shouting for Sirius in the last book and I didn't see Sirius's death coming at all, but I never cried. I'm no longer in a depressed state of mind; trying to compose a coherent description of the bizarre calm and order at Barnes and Noble helped tame the depression. Upon completing the end of The Amber Spyglass I was fairly profoundly quieted and on occasion depressed for over a week. Didn't cry then, all though I do whenever I hear Will and Lyra speaking with each other at the park bench, either on tape or when I watch the National Theatre production clips online. Perhaps, though, the differences between Harry Potter and His Dark Materials ought to be a separate post.

So, I am down to one last Harry Potter Book. My son will be two or three, I expect, when the last book arrives. I will bring him to the release party so that he may say he was there and because there was nothing like this when I was growing up. There were no world-wide releases, no internet to feed your addiction in between books. The passion you felt for a book back then was usually solitary and unwitnessed. I am glad that midnight releases and parties and countdowns on websites have started in time for my son to always have them so that he might on occasional stumble into a crowd of people aching with the same passion he feels for something he loves.