Day 231 End of an Era

I went on a date with the Baby the other night in celebration of the parental units giving us a break. After feasting (and I do mean feasting) on some delicious churrascos and deriding every prepubescent teenager that seriously thought they looked good when they stepped out of their house on a Friday night, we went to see the final film of the Harry Potter series.

And as a the WarnerBrothers signature flashed across the screen, the Baby took a sigh beside me in the darkened theater and said in a semi-disbelieving tone, "My childhood is ending."

While I was aware that her childhood technically ended years ago, I understood exactly where she was coming from. And, apparently, so did most of the audience. While technically a child's book, the story and its characters have evolved since the past years since the first book's release and, with them, so have the readers. Looking around the theater, I realized that not everyone was under the age of 18 and figured, like the Baby and myself, had bought the tickets for the sole purpose of saying good-bye to an old, fictional friend.

130 minutes later, the Baby looked at me in disbelief when I said I had expected more from the film. It's likely because I had a certain attachment to the story and loved the last book in all its fantastic attention to detail and depth that you couldn't hope to display on screen even if you broke up the final leg of the story into two films. It was a good film... but the story itself was better and I'm genuinely sad to see it end for good. Kind of like graduation, you knew it was going to happen but it hurts anyway to have to say good-bye.

So I won't say "bye." Just, see you later, Mr. Potter, between the pages of the hardbound copies in my bookshelf.