Lily's Letter was Epilogue (was Re: Ron and Parseltongue)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 183509

> zanooda:
> 
> Maybe, but I'm not entirely convinced :-). I don't think it took
> Sirius three months to send the broom. He missed Harry's birthday,
> right, but it seems to me that he sent the present the same day or
> right after, not in October! Why Lily would even describe him that
> birthday tea, if it happened so long ago? She also says that
"Harry's not old enough to know it's his birthday", not that "Harry
*was* not old enough ...". "Harry's" means "Harry is" here, right? Or
do I misunderstand it?

Pippin:
I read it the way you did at first and it confused me too. It wasn't
until I heard Jim Dale's reading that I realized there's another
interpretation. I'm not sure how to explain it since I can't reproduce
the intonation, but I could say, informally and conversationally,
"Harry's not old enough to know it's Christmas" and I wouldn't mean
that it's Christmas today and Harry doesn't know it, but that Harry
can't tell when it's Christmas and when it's not.

Said that way, Lily is reassuring Sirius that Harry doesn't understand
that he had a birthday and his presents were supposed to arrive on
that day. Sirius of course would not be confused about her meaning,
since he would know Harry's birthday was long over. 

Since Lily had had time to rearrange the house (wonder if she was good
at household-y spells) after the broken vase, and Harry had gotten
good enough on the broomstick to zip around obstacles like James's
legs instead of crashing into the cat, it wouldn't make sense that she
wrote the letter when it actually was Harry's birthday. She wrote it
afterwards, IMO, just shortly before she died, as other clues
indicate, and told Sirius all about the tea because she knew
he'd want to hear about it and hadn't had a chance to do so before. 

Hagrid and Lupin both went on missions that took them away for a long
period, and Lupin's didn't allow him to send letters, much less gifts.

The belated birthday present comes from PoA: "Please consider it
thirteen birthdays' worth of presents from your godfather."
I always wondered about that, because Sirius should have been around
for Harry's first birthday at least. But now we know he wasn't.

It makes a lot of other things easier to explain if Sirius had been
away for a good while, for instance, why the Fidelius wasn't
implemented sooner, and why Sirius didn't seem to be aware that
suspicion had fallen on him. It also suggests a means by which
Wormtail and Voldemort could have made Sirius look guilty: stop the
leaks and the killings while he was away, start them up again when he
returned.

Pippin