Proud to Be a Potterhead

It took three years, a lot of coaxing and putting him in a partial food coma to seal the deal, but I finally got my husband to convert.

"Read the first three books," I wheedled, "and you'll be a believer."

My husband loathes children's books, science fiction and "anything with gnomes and wizards and all that lame stuff." His idea of a pulse-quickening beach read is a thousand-page tome on U.S. foreign policy from 1918 to 1939. But one night a couple of months ago, after the fourth chicken taco, he began to give in.

Six books later, he's a bona fide Potterhead. Victory.

Now we're waiting together for the seventh and supposedly final book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. At one minute past midnight on Saturday morning, we'll be among the salivating fans who'll be snatching up copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

Finally, the answers to so many burning questions: Will Harry avenge his parents' deaths? Will Severus Snape redeem himself? Will Ron ask Hermione out? Will Lord Voldemort, the biggest baddy in children's literature, finally snuff it?

You'd think a theory-swapping, fan-fiction-loving superfan like myself would be ecstatic.

But I'm heartbroken.

I don't want this journey I've taken with Harry and his plucky gang to end.

Once upon a time, I despised Harry Potter books. (That was, naturally, before I'd read them.) Like any self-respecting college student, I detested anything mainstream. And in my freshman year, Rowling's boy-wizard books were more ubiquitous than Muggles on the Metro at rush hour.

"Children's tripe," I sneered. "I'd rather read something meaningful, like Faulkner or Joyce."

But one sunny Saturday, when I was home with the flu and everyone else was at a music festival, a friend left the first book, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," on my bed. My stubbornness weakened by a virulent infection, I began to read.