Modern literature, especially teen and children's literature gets dismissed unfairly all too often. Very few books are as well known as the Harry Potter series. My wife and I devoured them, we would curl up on our couches with two copies of the current book in hardback and race our way through. We had finished "The Order of the Phoenix" the summer before, and word had come down that the next book, untitled, would be released the following year. I had camped out at Borders bookstore to get our hardcover copies at midnight the year before; and I would do it again. From the first book through the seventh, they were a story that we read together and shared together.
That summer I would share some of our fun with our oldest son in the form of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, as presented on Audio Book by Stephen Fry that stands out in my mind. It was my third or fourth read through--but my first with my son. We roamed the country in our car listening to get him to sleep and sat by his bed with a CD player to finish a chapter. "Love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.” J.K. Rowling had a way to put words to a page that would give me a different way to think about the story; and listening to Stephen Fry read it would provide us something to share.
There are several books that have changed my life--far more than I could list easily.. books that change how I think about the world; how I view politics; how I think about love and loss. But Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Stephen Fry, especially this week, remind me of the moments as a father that I shared with my son before most of our journey began, and how my life changed forever in the years that followed.
This week has been a rough one in our household. I had thought about writing a different diary until this morning. Last night, for the second time, our son was submitted into an emergency psychiatric hold/hospital care for consideration for residential long-term treatment. I sat at the hospital last night until 5 a.m., handling paperwork, talking with doctors and nurses, and as I drove back in the early hours I remembered this summer so well that it became the story I wanted to share this week. Follow below the fold for more.
Summer of 2004
We were a young couple, living in a small town home in an older area of Overland Park. Our two-story town home had all the amenities we really needed, which could be defined as the people we loved and enough stray furniture to provide us a place to eat and sleep. At five years old my son and his four-year-old brother were the joy of my day; I had left my position as an IT Director with a retirement community to work closer to home and when I wanted to take a long lunch at my new job to come home and spend it with kids, it was easy.
That summer would be his first year in a summer school education program, aimed at helping him integrate into a traditional schoolroom. He would come home on the school bus at lunch and he would hide in his room, sometimes saying he had a good day; most of the time he would avoid us. But as he would leap through the door, the smile on his face came to our living room like sunlight to a field who had not seen the sun in days; he would beam his bright teeth and his big eyes and bounce around and I would have so much hope that he and I would share such great things together.
He would race up our stairs, a single flight to reach his room, a stripped-down children's room with a simple sleigh bed that looked like a Nascar race car and he would begin to scrawl his crayons on the wall, coloring his latest masterpieces. I knew someday I would have to repaint all of it, and at the time I kept thinking "it's so much work," telling him he needed to stop. Today, I think back on those artistic drawings and his sunny view of the world and I wish I had stepped back and appreciated it more.
Even at an early age, sleep was the most difficult thing for our son; we had been through periods of 24/48 hours of no sleep, where he would only go to sleep through exhaustion. It was the summer of 2004 where things tipped and his behavior became erratic and uncontrollable. My wife, tending to our younger child, needed a sanity break, and getting a child to sleep would be an important part of that. One thing that did put him to sleep was a good, long drive in the car seat restraints, as long as he and I could talk and he had something to listen to.
And on a late night drive we began our journey together, listening to Stephen Fry recount Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. For our son, this would be his first exposure to the book--the long road that existed between Louisburg and Kansas City would give us about an hour and a half drive time every night to listen to a CD and a half, as we would make our way through Stephen Fry's reading of a story I had embraced years before.
As much as I loved the story the first time, it was listening to it with my son that changed my world; I had plenty of spare time on those drives, to sit and think about the progress reports I was receiving from his school and to listen to him laugh along with Stephen. At the same time, his diagnosis was real now and I had no idea what the future would hold. It had seemed so ethereal just a year before, an unknown.. but this was the summer where it was no longer in question.
“Curious indeed how these things happen. The wand chooses the wizard, remember...I think we must expect great things from you, Mr. Potter... After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things—terrible, yes, but great.”
We were on a long drive that night, our son wouldn't get to sleep easily and I had a full tank of gas. My mother-in-law called to inquire how things were going. Had we tried herbal remedies? Maybe the diagnosis was all wrong. Most importantly life only hands you the challenges you are prepared to handle... if you have a big challenge, you are the person who can meet it.
I wondered about that then, I've wondered about it every day since then. It's a quaint phrase designed to basically say "this is your lot in life, live with it" on a more upbeat tone. But Stephen Fry's voice explaining the story about the choosing of a wand, and later, the choosing of a house reached me in a different way that summer.
"WHY!" "WHY!" "WHY!"
For a few years, our son had only one major question: why is this? He never had a follow-up, and I don't know if he had a deeper meaning behind his question but the fact that he kept asking it gave me time to talk to him on those drives. "Here's why." We would pause the book and we would share a story. He would laugh lavishly and follow my response with "Is that true? Is that real?" He couldn't easily separate out the real world from fiction, but the joy of having me tell it about it made us laugh.
We would park at gas stations to reach the ends of chapters, grab Gatorade, gas, and laughs. I would crawl in to the backseat and we would listen to Stephen Fry tell us of the latest happenings in Harry's world. In the most beautiful of summer weather, we would raise the volume, sit on an overpass and look up at all of the stars in the world visible in a way that they were not from our stoop as Harry accomplished his major tasks. We would listen and pause, laugh and talk... I would look into the backseat and see my son smile and flail his arms madly at moments that were exciting within the book. What was happening to Harry was exciting and interesting; it was funny and silly, but it was a story that for an hour and a half a night we shared for several weeks, with drinks and food and in the end a sleeping child behind me ready to go home.
You read things in books and see them in films about parents and what they give up for their children but as I can remember so clearly looking at my son in the rear view mirror I knew that he would be one of my greatest friends for the rest of my life, no matter what....
I followed him last night as the ambulance transported him from the hospital to the acute mental health treatment hospital after an attempted poisoning gone wrong. He hadn't managed to harm himself or others, it was a completely failed attempt. I followed the ambulance through Wyandotte County, a route I was unfamiliar with and I remembered all the long rides, the starry skies that looked down on us and our memories of Harry Potter... who amongst many things was mostly the boy who was loved.
We walked through the doors at 4:40 a.m. on March 7th to submit him for acute care. It would be just me seeing him go; my wife would be needed at home with our first son. The sliding glass doors of the center would separate us soon.. and for days.
The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
With any hospitalization there are fears and hopes. I could see him walking away into residential placement behind the glass doors and thought of Harry Potter seeing his parents; I thought of the small child in my backseat laughing as Stephen Fry laughed. There would be a powerful sadness and yet hope at the same time.
I found myself re-reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone this morning; it would be one of the last books he and I have shared. Those drives, that reading, those smiles and laughs are the priceless things that only we can share as moments in time that can never be recreated. I didn't appreciate them then enough; I enjoyed them, but I was an exhausted young parent with two young kids and a daily job.
But that book, and especially those CDs and those drives changed my life. They built bridges between us and gave us something to share. J.K. Rowling had crafted a book that wasn't just easy to devour and listen to, it was one that a parent could share with a child and that I wanted to share with my son.
“It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts.”
Tonight I will walk by his room many times and for the first time in a few years, he will not be coming home. There are no crayon drawings on the wall, he outgrew them. There are no fantasy books, he lost interest; only math and puzzle books find purchase on his shelves. We can't visit him today, maybe over the weekend.
I'll spend the next few days re-listening to Stephen Fry recount a hardback that has had so many workouts on my shelf. I remember the book well and love it; but I read it now to remember the experience and those moments that summer. The next few weeks will be difficult here; I know someone messaged me that I've kind of disappeared this week, now you know in part why. But I think about those drives and that face that smiled behind me until he went to sleep... memory shows us the fondest desires of our hearts, it seems.