My daughter is the only member of our family who has read the complete series of Harry Potter books. She has read them several times. She became Hermione when she was ten and slipped away from dull suburbia by often placing an artistically, hand-rendered note on her tent during our campouts: “Do Not Disturb.” We knew she wished to be left alone, immersed in any one of the Harry Potter books and her most exciting, magical world of true friends.

I was the first in our family to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. My son followed suit, in one long sway on a hammock at Nickerson State Park, Cape Cod, when he was five. We had a Harry Potter birthday party for him that fall season, right around the time of Halloween. It was epic. I was Minerva McGonagall, the Deputy Headmistress. My husband was Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster. Our gypsy wagon, a monstrous and beloved RV, filled the role of the Hogwart’s Express and delivered the party wizards to the local indoor pool where we played our own version of Quidditch. Pool noodles served as broomsticks and every boy believed he soared through the water on a Nimbus 2000.

In those days, few children knew about Harry and Hogwart’s, so I had to scour the countryside for Chocolate Frogs and such. There wasn’t one iota of commercialism surrounding the soon-to-be-blockbuster books. Our imaginations ran wild planning the party. We transformed our home into the Leaky Cauldron Cafe and the basement became Professor Snape’s Potions Mixing Class. It was scary—some kids preferred to stay out of the basement.

My son read every book, except for the last one. By then, his own life was being transformed by a dreary New England prep school where the whole business of real battles for good and evil were well underway, in the flesh.

My husband never read any of the books. Nor did he watch any of the movies. But, one day, in New York City, while he was waiting for me to finish drinking a cup of tea, he turned on the TV in our hotel room. There, on the screen, he witnessed dragons being born into the hands of Harry Potter and his friends. Soon, the screen erupted into dragon-dark mayhem. “Wow,” my husband said. “Did our kids watch this when they were little?”

Later, we set out to find New York City’s version of a Diagon Alley magic shop. It still exists, but who knows for how long. The shop—Tannen’s—has been in business since 1925. It’s small, the lights are dim, and no one protects you when you choose to go through the door—where spirits and ghosts remain. The shop is in Herald Square, 45 West 34th Street, on the sixth floor. It is down the hall from the vestiges of Martinka and Company, which only exists in cyberspace nowadays, but was once presided over by Houdini. In fact, on the wall inside of Tannen’s, there are a few Houdini artifacts worth mulling over.

Once inside Tannen’s, magicians and tricksters will play with every unknown thought pattern that runs through your mind. They will make your eyes get bigger and bigger. They will draw delight from all the recessed memories of your childhood. They will cause you to stumble and fall and laugh about it. I recognized some of the magicians—many of them were the odd little children that hovered next to me on the outskirts of schoolyard playgrounds. They ate glue with me and licked their lips incessantly and couldn’t stop blinking their eyes or looking for something else to do besides sit still and ace worksheets. Their pants were too short, their hair never behaved, and they couldn’t read or spell or memorize their times tables. They never cared that what I wanted more than anything else was to be a boy. I dressed like a boy and acted like a boy, but when the bullies came after us, I failed at fighting like a boy and ended up in a heap, with the others, on the edge of the playground.

The magicians inside Tannen’s must have all received their letters of admission to Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as the years went by. They now know that the rest of us are Muggles and they are not. They performed simple and complicated card tricks, juggling tricks, and foamy ball tricks. There were human-scaled boxes I could use to saw my husband apart and boxes I could use to stab him repeatedly with swords.

To walk into Tannen’s is completely free, as is the entertaining hocus pocus that ensues. I drank up and let the tricksters have their way with me. My husband, on the other hand, felt his mind twisting inside out. It began to occur to him that his Muggle parents might have destroyed a long-ago letter of admission to Hogwarts, with his name on it. The cases filled with magical madnesses intrigued him. He purchased invisible decks of cards and video instruction on how to realize your repressed wizard self.

Yesterday, I came home late from a meeting. My husband entertained me with a magic trick. I was duly impressed and asked him how he learned to do it. He admitted that, instead of checking his endless email and phone messages, he listened to and watched his instructive magic video the whole ride home from work, on the commuter train from Boston.

I thought it so wonderful! After years of stressing out as a Muggle, working late, dragging his feet over to Boston’s South Station to take the train home—he had finally found his way to King’s Cross Station, Platform 9 3/4, and broken through the barrier to climb aboard the Hogwart’s Express!

Not only that, but he is an uber gypsy dude—the only one heading west from Boston, out to the suburbs, being educated via magic-instruction videos.  Perhaps it’s a newfangled version of a Hogwart’s “on-line” degree for late bloomers.