AND IF THEY SHOULD BAR WARS...

Song of the day: Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band (12” mix), Meco

Star Wars was the first movie I ever went to see alone. I rode a few miles on my banana-seated bike in a late-spring rain to the Manetto Hill Twin.

I was pretty much awestruck, right from the opening scroll.

When it was over, I sat through the end of the credits, fished a few wrinkled dollar bills from my pocket, went to the box office, and bought a ticket for the very next show.

The movie had opened exactly one week after my father died, and in retrospect it’s no surprise that so many of the themes resonated like a hammered bell.

I saw the movie a good 20 times in the theater over the course of that summer.

And I came out of the summer with little to nothing in the way of Star Wars ephemera.

No cards, no action figures, no die-cast Millennium Falcons, no lunch boxes, no light sabers, no board games, no comic books, no Halloween costumes.

All I carried was gratitude at having been transported from a suburban home thick with grief, guilt, and shame, to a galaxy far, far away...