This morning I asked my son, “You’ve been at Hogwarts for three days, can you turn a teacup into a rat?”

He looks at me, eyebrows raised.

“What about your broomstick work—flying yet?”  Shakes his head, grinning widely.

 “What about your potions?  No potions?  Can you at least predict the future?  Here’s the cat—do you see a hairball in her future?”  Continues to giggle and shake his head.

I don’t know why I do it.  Every year I sign this kid up for Hogwarts and every year . . .

 “Don’t you remember when the owl brought your acceptance letter?  I was so proud.  I thought we’d have a wizard in the family—you remember, when it came down the chimney?” I gesture towards the long-expired coal heater fireplace in the living room.

“How is it going to get down there?  We don’t have a chimney,” he says, disgusted.

I said, “Well, it’s magic, innnit?”  We looked at each other.

He said, “We did some kind of divination the other day.”

I grin and ask, “Crystal balls, tea leaves?”

He shakes his head.  “Tarot cards?”

He says, “It wasn’t Tarot cards.”

  Bad:  things that suck your will to live

Yeah,  my kid goes to Hogwarts every year at our church, along with a couple of dozen other wizarding fans.  Some of them are older than he is and they volunteer to help out in our fantasy-based camp.  Others are even younger, and their robes go down to their sneakers and sandals.

 I don’t know how many Hogwarts camps there are in the US.  I don’t know if they are all run out of Unitarian Universalist Churches.  But it’s a hell of an alternative to Vacation Bible School.

 Adults bring in exotic pets for Magical Creatures class.  They made slime in potions.  They crafted runes one year for forune-telling.  They plant beans for Herbology.  There is a fire-eater this year, and I saw some people who were face-painting.  The kids run around playing Quidditch.  The goals are street hockey goals with hula hoops tied to the outside—the blodgers are beach balls, the Golden snitches are “fairies” the littlest and fastest kids who run around playing tag with the other players.

 There are robes and hats.  After the first year, our Hogwarts has house names that do not match the books—so that kids who have decided that they are Gryffindors do not end up sentenced to being Ravenclaws (the most mysterious of the four Hogwarts Houses).

 This year is a boom year at Hogwarts Camp with 39 kids signed up.  They’re having a ball.  I’ve sent my kid to the wonderful and (pricy) JCC camps, the wonderful (and pricy) Zoo camps, but it’s this one, where they get to tie-dye a shirt themselves, for which he has fond memories.  He’s not the world’s biggest Harry Potter fan, but when he read and re-read the first three books in second grade, he raised his reading level to sixth grade.  He’s still using the vocabulary he picked up from Rowling’s works.

  A librarian mom's blessing

            The real magic is that Hogwarts Camp is going on in New Orleans, in a church that took on several feet of water in Katrina.  Our sanctuary has a new tile labyrinth on the floor and we sit on chairs so that the labyrinth is accessible when we don’t have a service.  Much of the building is under construction nearly five years after Katrina.  We have been given money from our fellow congregations and worked with other local UU churches to recover from the storm. 

While most UU churches have rich members, in New Orleans, our liberal members do not make large salaries, even while we do a lot of good in our jobs as teachers, professors, public interest attorneys, librarians, and social workers. 

    9/05 mouldering pews

 When I went to a service recently, I noticed a lot of new faces and younger faces.  This is probably the result of the surge of young people who have moved down to "save New Orleans."   Whether we will be able to keep these singles here much longer is a question.  Our recovery has burnt out a few—and many of our long-term residents resent the impetus for change.  I think that the few dozen corrupt politicians who have been indicted, convicted, or forced to resign find the post-Katrina landscape difficult to like.

 The current residents of New Orleans owe our city's very existence to the kindness of strangers—whether we’ve hugged you lately or not.  And there’s a little bit of magic in New Orleans.  And a little bit of New Orleans in you all.