3:51am March 17, 2012

My hobbit parents

Right around the time they were retiring, my parents, now 65 and 70, saw the Lord of the Rings movies. They immediately read the books (I paper clipped the parts that the movies hadn’t got to yet). Then they declared themselves hobbits.

They retired and moved to the mountains. They put a sign on the road to their house that says “Baggs End”. (Our last name is Baggs. Yes, this got me teased when we read The Hobbit in class as a kid.) They started saying stuff like “We’re not overweight. We’re hobbits and we like our food.” My dad went to see the third movie in the theater and talked about how everyone cheered during the fight scenes like when he was a kid.

To this day, they constantly refer to themselves as hobbits and make tons of hobbit jokes. And my mom does scary-accurate Gollum impressions.

Growing up I never expected them to like this stuff, even though I was pretty obsessed with it. Now, they reference it more than I do. (I maintain that I’m an Ent. That’s why, simultaneously, all language is foreign to me and I can rarely avoid going into long-winded detail about everything. And in the redwood forest I was born in, I made tree friends before I made human ones.) It is really cool to share this sort of thing over such a wide generational divide. (They had me late, by accident, so they’re technically old enough to be my grandparents.)

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