A Time for Bonding

I was always surrounded by books when I was growing up. While some families would finish the day and crowd around the TV, my family was sprawled throughout the living room with books. The TV would be on, but mainly for background noise and for my oldest brother who was (and still isn't) a reader. My dad, my mom, my sister...they could always be found with a book in hand, and we had shelves filled with them in nearly every room in the house. I can remember being read to from a very young age, by both of my parents, and by my older siblings. I can also remember being four and not being allowed to go outside to play until I had read one book aloud, and wrote my name ten times :)

Oddly enough, though, my favorite memories of reading do not come from those years before school, though I have plenty that I'm fond of. When I think of the reading time that meant the most to me, it's easy to settle on the years of 1998 to 2002, from the time I was eleven to fifteen. My dad went to prison when I was ten, and every Sunday me and my mom would get in the car and drive to wherever he was to go and visit him. During the four and a half years he was gone, he was as close as forty minutes and as far away as three and a half hours. Sometime around the second year of traveling each Sunday, me and my mom settled into the routine of turning off the radio and turning to the Harry Potter books.

We would drive along for hours, sipping on fountain drinks from some convenience store, and she would man the wheel while I read aloud from the series. We'd finish chapters each weekend on those long trips, then put the book aside until the next Sunday. In the course of four years, we finished the first four books, and read some more than once while waiting for the fifth one to come out.

I can remember those trips clearly still...the heat of the seat underneath my legs, the way my throat would grow dry and scratchy. I can remember laughing with my mom, or crying with her in some cases, and discussing the characters and the plot afterwards, wondering what would come next. I suppose that's one of the reasons I never outgrew my love for the Harry Potter series...to me, it's much more than just a fun little book series. It represents the journey me and my mom took together during one of the hardest periods of my life.

I'm no longer a child, but we still sit around and talk about Harry now and again. We have a date the first day each movie is released, to go and see it together then go out and stuff ourselves with pizza. Reading the books gave me and my mom something to bond over, and a way to lock ourselves away in Rowling's fantasy world instead of dwelling on everything we were actually experiencing. I'll always love the Harry Potter books for that reason alone, for giving me and my mom a reason to laugh when our lives were devoid of humor. Reading together really did help us through a tough patch.