Professor Minerva McGonagall, the GPS

If you’ve ever driven in Boston, you know that the street sign situation is dire, a bona fide dearth. The conventional wisdom goes that if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t belong here. I have lost count of the number of U-turns we’ve had to take.

Directionally-challenged or not, Boston will give you a run for your money. I swear that whoever the poor person was who had to enter Boston into Mapquest is now in Bellevue for a well-deserved rest.

We, however, allowing ourselves to catch up to the 21st century, have foiled Boston’s streets for the moment. Enter Professor Minerva McGonagall in a new format. If you’re a Harry Potter person, you know who she is: Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She’s been around the school forever, knows its, and its students’, ins and outs.

Professor Minerva McGonagall can always be counted on to give clear directions to anyone who asks her. That’s why we named our new TomTom One GPS device after her. She even knows how to get around Boston.

At the end of last week, we took her out for her maiden voyage to a place we knew how to get to, just to see if she’d take us the way we normally went. She did, but some of her directions were a little woolly {British English for unclear}. What we would have considered a turn, and Mapquest would have called a slight right, Minerva considered straight ahead. Oh well.

In Boston, even with a GPS device, one still has to know where one is going. Sort of anyway. No matter. The thing that cracked us both up was “disobeying” her directions, watching the device scramble for a new route when we did, and correcting our course after we finished our side trip.

One thing I get to do today is find a British-accented voice for our Professor. I’m hoping there’s a wonderful Maggie Smith-like one. I don’t know yet if our Professor will be quite as acerbic as Maggie’s Minerva, but it doesn’t matter. We had so much fun projecting her outrage on ourselves as we drove that it made the whole thing worth it.

“Can’t you be bothered to follow simple directions?” we howled. Each of us took turns playing the Professor’s well-meant corrective self. The thing I liked best though, really, was the idea that someone was in the car with me, wanting to get me where I wanted to go. And, that if I took a wrong turn, she has the capability of correcting my course.

Wouldn’t it be swell if we all had a Professor Minerva McGonagall within? I think so.

Magic is Afoot

{NO SPOILERS HERE!}

I happen to know two people who celebrated birthdays this weekend and I'm so glad both were born, but the real gift was Saturday’s arrival of the latest and last book in the Harry Potter series. I’d ordered it months ago. Months. As I’d had some less-than-totally-satisfactory delivery experiences with earlier volumes, I was Girl Scout prepared for this one.

Imagine my delight when all my visualized scenarios evaporated as I heard the book thud onto our marble front steps at 6:44 AM! I was so pleased that I was actually able to discipline myself to stay on my own writing schedule before I even opened the package. Just knowing it was here was enough.

Around 8:54 AM I opened Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling and just let it sit on my desk in silence, glowing. Perhaps I was the one glowing, but it could have been the orangey Mary GrandPré cover too. I kept whispering to myself, “It’s here. It’s here!”

Finally, I couldn’t stand it, and I fell into the meticulously-crafted world of wizards and witches and the ultimate battle of good and evil, and I was completely quiet. My whole house was silent. I ate up the words till 3 PM when my eyes gave out and I had to take a nap. I was about 400 pages in. A little over half-way.

Up again, eyes rested, I carried on. Reading ever faster. I moved chairs from time to time so I wouldn’t get stiff. I read in the kitchen, in my office, in the living room, on the porch. I knew I had to finish it before I could go to sleep.

I got emails from friends. They were jealous that my copy had come so early. One was already done and wanted to talk about it. Another wanted to talk after we both finished it. This was a much anticipated book.

The further and further I went into Harry’s world, the quieter I became, and the quieter my house became. Reading is, for me, a silent pleasure. The peace that silence brings with it “enables me to experience and absorb it all more intensely.” (I’m quoting Tijn Touber in the June issue of Ode Magazine, where I’m part of the team of Readers Bloggers, from an article he wrote on his experience of a silent retreat.)

It was 10:07 PM when I finished the book. I sat under a Victorian stained glass lamp on my sofa in the living room and clasped the book to my chest. Silent. Pleasure. Oh yes. J. K. Rowling fulfills every storyline and then some in this final volume. Well worth the wait. I’ll start it again in the morning and read more slowly next time.

I couldn’t call my friend to talk it through though, not last night. Instead, I had to hug the book to myself for a little while. In the silence. With the pleasure. As we say in my neck of the woods,

Mazel Tov, J. K. Rowling!

Thank you and bless you for writing Harry Potter.

One other thought. It did not escape me that as millions of Americans were sitting down with a book about the battle between good and evil that we had a different president than our usual one. Mr. Bush was having minor surgery so for 2 ½ hours Mr. Cheney was president. Thank God, magic was afoot.