Luna Lovegood

I haven't seen all the Harry Potter movies as it occurred to my taste that the first few were epics and the rest became a little too dark for my enjoyment. I did like the characters a whole lot as they were, as in most significant yarns, fairly well drawn, and one of my passing favorites was Luna Lovegood who was just quirky enough to stand out well against the well formed and more familiar characters.  Somehow I think that is what makes life fun - not the usual, but the unusual - and in a movie series like this it takes something for a character to emerge from the noise.  That pretty much sums up life as we know it.

I grew up pretty vanilla.  I had a couple friends in grade and high school who stood out but mostly we all wanted to blend it, with talents or academic prowess in one form or another being the characteristics we wanted prominent.  We didn't have goths, there were no tattoos and certainly no Luna types walking the halls. We did have a fair share of "little bit odds" but we stayed away because, as in any hot-house like high school, you didn't 'go near a plant that grew funny' as my mom used to say. We mistook offbeat for threatening as if oddness spreads like a cold. It is that entire idea of "oddness" that takes me up this morning.  We don't have enough of it.  We also didn't have any Luna types except one.

All this bubbles up (toil and trouble) this morning as there is a yearbook from my high school up on line on one of the nostalgia sites where I am buying advertising for a client. I stopped to look at myself and to thumb through that yearbook (do you thumb through online?) as my volume went away several years ago in a household move.  There Sue (our Luna) stood on a page with others who were involved with the literary publication (don't laugh, in that little collection of 8 who published that yearly thing we had 6 published authors and professional writers).  Sue didn't stand anywhere much longer, taking her own life 2 years later at college.  Her dad ran the Sears store in town.  She was always the top student in the school.  Always.  I think that she read magazines upside down and could have if asked. She was also somewhat aloof although unfortunately not happy in her solitude.  Like Luna, she was perhaps in one personal scrape too many and unlike Luna didn't have the ability to skip down the hallway when no one was looking.

I suspect Sue would have liked Luna very much; all independence, brilliance and good heart. She was, in her own way, as finely drawn as Luna is and the reason I know that is that after 4 decades plus, I can remember her so well. She stood out in clear relief from the rest of us and although we didn't understand her and thought her a bit of an odd duck. She was the epitome of harmless and non-threatening in spite of her considerable skills and gifts. Her magic wand was her mind.

Luna caused me to put Sue in some sort of perspective, as trite as that observation sounds.  We all have friends who are on the good side of "off the beaten path" and we probably need to enjoy them at the time rather than put up with them as a memory.

My life's lesson for a cold and gray morning.