Horcrux: cheap on Amazon

We have some big news.

Are you sitting down?

Kendon and I

finished Harry Potter!

11.11.11 was a big day for us.  We hunkered down on the futon with a bag full of Wendy’s and didn’t stop reading until the Horcruxes had all been found and Voldemort had been defeated and Harry and Ginny had sent their little red-headed babies off on the Hogwarts Express and every last natural-cut French fry had been consumed.

We closed that very last book with a new sense of meaning in life and a determination to pass on the bazillion life lessons of Harry to our own offspring one day.   We discussed the brilliance of J.K. Rowling as she interweaved characters, generations and objects to create a culminating tapestry of meaning.  We discussed the epiphanies we experienced as we ended the last chapter of the last book, after nine months of seven years of Hogwarts.  It was a bit like closing a chapter in our lives, we decided.

Conveniently, the last movie came out on DVD last night.  “Perfect!” we shouted.  It was like 11.11.11 was the day when the stars aligned and magic really happened and dreams really did come true.  So we bought the entire BluRay series.  And, hours after finishing Book 7, we watched Movie 7 Part 2 for the first time ever.

I’m not exactly sure what we were expecting.  All that I remember after putting it in are flashes of memory that include explosions, bad acting, and making out.  Nothing made sense.  No stars aligned.  Voldemort laughed at the end in such a jovial manner that I laughed with him and wanted to give him a high five.  Which isn’t right at all.  We finished the movie and I racked my brain trying to remember what life lessons we were supposed to draw from this.  I tried to remember what Dumbledore had told Harry that was so deep. Because he couldn’t have possibly had time to say it in the 30 seconds screen time he was given. 

That DVD become like a disgusting Horcrux.  It ruined our mood.  It ruined 11.11.11.  So we destroyed it.  Actually we sent it back to Amazon after paying a small restocking fee.  And that’s close enough for us.

Death by chocolate: grim. sad. ugly.

Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake.”  I could kill that crazy French Hitler woman, if she weren't already dead.

It was Kendon’s birthday last week, and all he wanted – with the exception of a small country, a pony, and the beta version of Minecraft – was Costco’s quadruple chocolate cake, which is roughly ¼ the size of our refrigerator.  We bought it the night before his birthday, when all we’d eaten all day were stale tortilla chips and smashed Nutri-grain bars.  We picked up the cake and angels began to sing from the fluorescent hanging lights high above us.  We could smell the Dutch cocoa and almost taste the shaved chocolate flakes generously strewn across the side. And the frosting.  Oh, the liberal amounts of perfect chocolate frosting.  The frosting taunted us from beneath that plastic protective dome cover, daring us to rip it up and dip our fingers in and lick off the chocolate right there in the bakery department.  That there frosting sealed the deal, and we returned home that night the proud parents of the most beautiful cake on this good planet.  We thought of splitting it in half and finishing it off for dinner.

I would love to end this story by saying that we did just that: that Kendon blew out his birthday candles and we filled ourselves with cake and rode ponies and moved on with our lives.  But that’s not how it happened at all.

It has been ten days.  That chocolate cake is STILL IN OUR FRIDGE.  It still taunts us, but not in the same way it did in Costco that day.  Every day since the birthday, we’ve had a piece of that cake.  And every day, there is still more of that cursed cake to eat.  Nowadays, our bellies cry in protest, and tears stream down my face as I shakily cut us another slice.  “We’ve.... got… to finish it,” I say to Kendon, who has begun to hide in a corner every time I pull that horrid Costco tray out of the fridge.  “Mustn’t… waste…food.”  Then we force ourselves to shove down one more piece, wishing for death for one more chocolate cakey evening.     

I think next year we’ll have vanilla cupcakes.  Mini ones.  Make that just one mini vanilla cupcake. With no frosting.  And we’ll split it in half.

Our weekend in the desert

Last weekend we went to the desert, where my throat engages in a constant, selfish supplication for more water, and I turn into the dried-out creatures I see wandering the desert on shows like “Life”: yellow-eyed and slow.

I always thought that beauty had to include green.  The lush jungles of Hawaii or the mountainous pines of the northwest or the flowery meadows of my very own Utah create memories that look like romantic impressionist paintings. Going to the desert has taught me that beauty can also be the contrast of a blue sky against an endless stripe of red-brown. When you recall the desert, it looks like modern art.

In the desert this weekend, we went through years worth of old, dusty boxes in Kendon’s childhood home. The goal was to salvage the treasures and throw away the rest. And I started thinking about the significance of a box.

The problem is, nothing can go into a box unless it is a treasure to begin with.  We fill boxes with sentimental knick-knacks, samples of our finest work, and with the quiet hope that the contents of our box will one day see the light of day again; that our children will admire them, that they’ll go on display, or that we’ll put them to use years down the road.

So when a box gets reopened, the reasons flood back.  The nostalgia and the sentiment and the hopes may be dusty, but they’re there, waiting for you in their dark cardboard confines.  And you have to decide if your treasured things are now trash.

And sometimes it’s painful, the decision; the remembering.  Important treasures, like love, get packed away into our boxes, where they become forgotten until they disintegrate from years of wind and sun beating them into dust.  And when the box gets reopened, you remember what your treasure looked like before it was nothing.  And you feel a little sad.

So I was careful last weekend as I went through someone else’s treasures.  I was careful to remember that, buried beneath the cobwebs and dust of each box was another memory, another quiet hope.  I tried to imagine my Kendon playing with each toy as a little boy, making little boy noises and turning the living room couch into a racetrack, or a war zone, or the Wild West.  I tried to imagine the concentration and pride he put in to drawing this purple monster or winning this plastic trophy. I tried to imagine the love that went into each letter and card; the comfort and laughter it once gave to its recipient.  I tried to imagine each object’s life before the box. And I tried to hold onto these thoughts when I had to throw their containers away.

When we left the desert this weekend, I started thinking about my own boxes, tucked away in a closet at home.  And I decided to blow away some more dust.