“I should have been born in the Age of Middle Earth,” said my 11-year-old daughter Alexandra as we rode the train down to Manhattan one February day in 2002. “I don’t belong in this time.”
Alexandra had been lamenting like this for weeks, ever since she had seen The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three screen adaptations of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by director Peter Jackson.
Life in the Age of Middle Earth was no picnic, I told her (I assumed it corresponded to the Middle Ages). There was plague and no antibiotics. Most people had very few outfits or hot baths.
“But I could have been a gentile,” Alex said.
“Good news, honey,” I said. “You are a gentile, and in a time and place where you can have medicine and hot baths whenever you need them.”
“You don’t know what I mean!”
Tracy Cochran 