The girls were off at a church event this evening, and The Belgian Wonder was doing all the driving. So I flipped on the television and landed on a station showing ”The Wizard of Oz.”The girls have all seen it, but The Boy never has.”What’s this?” he asked. Dorothy was about to meet the Scarecrow when we tuned in.”It’s a famous movie called ‘The Wizard of Oz.’”He wiggled underneath the bedcovers and settled in. I tried to bring him up to speed, explaining the few but critical details he missed:  Auntie Em, the tornado, the house swirling into a magical land and smashing the Wicked Witch of the East, the ruby slippers, the munchkins.During a commercial break, I performed some of the songs he missed, including a pretty good rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.” I even represented the Lollipop Guild. By the time the movie came back on, he was completely sucked in–utterly enchanted, if you will. No, no, not by my voice–by the story, the Technicolor, the dancing and singing, the unexpected friendships, the suspense.Everyone should watch a movie like that with a child who doesn’t know a single detail about it–he wasn’t sure that Dorothy would make it to Oz, let alone all the way back to Kansas. He’d never seen the flying monkeys, or the great and powerful disembodied Oz-head floating above puffs of colored smoke. He had no idea that Toto would pull back the curtain at the end.He had never heard, ”I’ll get you, my pretty…and your little dog, too.”He wasn’t expecting, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”Would anything scary happen to them in the poppy field? He was very concerned.Would the red sand run out of the hourglass before her friends could reach her? Would the witch snatch her away to be killed?He flinched and gasped when the witch lit her broom to torch the Scarecrow. He considered diving under the covers to hide, but bravely kept watching.When Dorothy tossed the bucket of water on his arm to put out the fire, of course, it lands on the witch.I watched The Boy’s face as he watched the screen and listened to the witch’s dying words, “I’m melting…I’m melting…”She melted completely away, of course, as she always does, leaving her black hat and cloak in a jumble on the castle floor. The Boy stared in disbelief.”Witches melt?” he exclaimed.”That one does,” I said.So he saw it to the end, when Dorothy clicked her heels and swooned back home to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, and her three friends, and the traveling fortune teller, who shows up outside the window to make sure she made it home safely. By that time, the girls had come home from their outing and were watching with us.Over time, children in every culture add to a library of shared experiences. Books, fairy tales, famous sayings, and for 20th and 21st Century kids, movies, too, are all part of that broad collection.”The Wizard of Oz” is part of that library. At some point, most American kids watch it and store on the shelves of their imagination strong images of the tornado and the flying monkeys. And then they share it with the rest of us. People of all ages quote from it often.Tonight, a page has turned in the Kroeker household. The Boy has been off to see the wizard, witnessed the end of two evil witches, and made it back home again. He’s added it to his personal, very American library.We’ll find out later if he’s haunted by the flying monkeys.But the sweet message that I’m glad we all share now is the main lesson of the film. Surrounded by his mom, dad and sisters, The Boy heard it. I hope it will always be true (I have to end with it, you know; I really have no other option)….There’s no place like home.