Confessions of a wannabe Hogwarts student

Can you keep a secret?

I wish I was 11 years old.

Not the 11 years old that I already was, back in 1990. No - I want to be 11 years old and getting a letter - by owl - that says I've been accepted to Hogwarts.

I want to turn a teacup into a mouse. I want to levitate pillows and hurl them across the room. I want to ride the Hogwarts Express from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, buy a pumpkin pasty from the trolley and perform the Bat-Bogey Hex on Draco Malfoy as I walk down the corridor to my compartment. I want a Marauder's Map, an Invisibility Cloak and a bottle of butterbeer. I want moving pictures, talking portraits, mobile suits of armor and a pet Hippogriff. I want to use the visitor's entrance to the Ministry of Magic, learn how to Apparate and buy a set of Extendable Ears.

I want to go to Hogwarts.

This was a whispered confession to a friend when we finally got to talk about the "Harry Potter" series. I confessed that within weeks of finishing the seventh book, I picked up the first book and started all over again. "I just didn't want to leave Hogwarts," I said, looking around to make sure the walls weren't listening. "The thing is ... I wish I had gone to Hogwarts! I want to be there ... It makes me want to be a kid again."

She silently nodded, wide-eyed, as though I had read her mind.

They're just not normal books.

They're the kind of books that you pick up, thinking that you'll only read a chapter or two ... and 120 pages later, you realize it's the middle of the night and you should probably go to bed, but you just don't want to. The Sorting's about to take place, after all.

So right now, I'm a copy editor, using Muggle technology to put stationary pictures on a page. But tonight ... tonight, I'll get sorted into Gryffindor House; I'll enter the Forbidden Forest with Hagrid and Fang ... and I'll learn, once again, about the Sorcerer's Stone.

I really want to be 11 years old.