Wardens of the Wild

Unexpected Parties and Merging Storylines

Part 2 of “How to Kill a Mockingbird and Other Family Observations”

My 12-year-old daughter reads as though the world of Fahrenheit 451 is rapidly approaching. This past year, her literary interests and mine have begun to merge.

At the beginning of the year, we both read “The Wingfeather Saga” – a series of four Narnia-style high-fantasy books by Andrew Peterson.

During the summer, we raced through the 100 Cupboards series and The Ashtown Burials, two series by N. D. Wilson. I don’t usually read middle-grade fantasy novels. It’s been a while since I had read books where the main protagonist is under 15 and the supporting characters include wizards, dragons, and raggants.

But reading this genre has been surprisingly refreshing.

And reading alongside my daughter has offered a sort of sublimity, the way we can share a single phrase from one of the books and know exactly what the other person is talking about.

We are currently reading The Lord of the Rings together and are just past the point when Frodo and Samwise Gamgee encounter Faramir.

My daughter and I in the summer of 2016 with a few favorite reads.

Something about reading the same books has brought my daughter and me into each other’s worlds like never before. It’s something I treasure because my daughter is like the proverbial still water that runs deep. It’s never easy to know what she is thinking or feeling.

When Jessica turned twelve, I threw her an unexpected party. Not a surprise party, but an unexpected party. A merging of Bilbo’s “unexpected journey” in The Hobbit and his “long-expected party” 60 or so years later in The Fellowship of the Ring.

I had wanted to throw her this party a year before, on her 11^th birthday. After all, it was on Bilbo’s 111^th (or eleventy-first) birthday that he threw his long-expected party.

But that year had been my first semester at Fresno State University as an undergraduate. I had no idea what to expect. I had registered for twenty-two units and cut out extraneous adventures that season, including birthday parties – unexpected or not.

Jessica’s unexpected party was a rare, but satisfying, success. My husband took the kids out in the morning to Blackbeard’s, a fun park. As soon as they left, I began preparing.

Actually, I had begun preparing in July, when I ordered 52 feet of crushed velvet online – blue, red, and the perfect green-gray – and began stitching Elvish cloaks. After all, when unexpected guests started arriving, they needed to look the part.

I had also been trying my hand at Elvish penmanship, putting to paper some favorite Tolkien quotes. I ended up printing most of the quotes in papyrus font.

With the kids out of the house, I lit a candle and burned the edges of the papers until my throat burned and my clothes smelled like I had made an unexpected visit to Mount Doom.

I pulled out my wood-burning kit and searched the garage for bits of wood I could use as signposts to Lothlorien, Mordor, and Erebor. I hid the decorations before Daniel and the kids returned, waiting to pull everything out and hang it all up at the last minute, before guests started arriving.

That afternoon, Jessica emerged from her room to the sight of the quotes and signposts and Hobbit-style snacks. I presented Jessica with a gray-green cloak and pinned it to her with a Lothlorien leaf. The unexpected guests – family and her two best friends – started arriving.

For days afterward, Jessica wore that cloak. She asked if she could put the Tolkien quotes up in her room. She needed more space in her room for all of it, she told me.

It wouldn’t be inappropriate to say I felt proud for getting it right. But more than that, I felt like I was fixing something, bridging a wordless gulf of loneliness that so often darkens those not-quite-teen years.