Star Wars

When my grandfather died, he left me a metal motorcycle he fashioned by hand and a box made of some fancy, precious material (I can’t remember what it’s called). Nice sentimental objects that I’ve put on a shelf with my other special things to remind me of people and places I love. But my real treasured gift from my grandfather is a book he bought me when I was very young, maybe eight or nine years old.

Papa used to come pick me up in his huge blue pick-up truck. I assume this was to take me to his house in Michigan City, but I honestly can’t remember for sure. What I remember is the long journey there. In adulthood, getting to Michigan City from where I lived in LaPorte takes a brief twenty minutes, the same amount of time it takes me to drive to work every day now. But in my childhood, that drive was an eternity. I don’t remember the landmarks, the roads, anything outside of that truck. I just remember inside—the space between us that stretched on forever. What does a fifty-something-year-old man say to a little girl who dies a little every day because of what goes on at home? I imagine he felt the same way about me that I feel now about my little brother and sister. My heart breaks and yearns for them. I want to take them away from it all. Give them some peace, some money, and most importantly some sense of self. I want them to know that I care. I want them to believe that things will get better for them if they want, that they don’t have to be defined by their parents’ shortcomings. But what if they don’t want to hear that? What if they won’t believe? What if they choose the same mistakes? Trying and failing to reach them would hurt even more than sadly watching and saying nothing.

So we would sit in silence, Papa and me. He would make a few efforts at small talk. “What ya thinking?” was his favorite thing to ask me. “I don’t know. Nothing.” Usually I would daydream. That’s how I always coped as a child and even still sometimes now. For years, I was incapable of falling asleep without inventing outlandish stories in my head. But the thing is, those stories were a private way of blocking out the pain in my world. They weren’t stories I could ever share with someone else. Maybe a normal creative child who invented stories would have fun sharing them with someone else. But not me. They were my escape, and there wasn’t much point in escaping if I brought someone else with me. So I did what I always did back then. I remained silent. Tried to look dumb and careless. Inside, I was creating worlds and thinking so much more than anyone knew. I wonder how much he knew?

On one of these trips, we stopped for gas. Papa came back to the car with a book for me. A three-hundred-page Star Wars book. To this day, I have no clue why he thought I would enjoy it. I don’t think I’d ever even seen Star Wars at that point. I certainly was not interested in reading it. It was also the second book in a three-part series. Years later, I did become enamored with Star Wars. The original trilogy was re-released and Mark Hamil won my heart with John Williams’ soundtrack in the background. I devoured Star Wars books, starting with the one Papa had bought for me all those years earlier. Now, I remember that book with nostalgic fondness. It was an attempt at crossing that chasm I had created between myself and people who cared, people who understood more about my life than I ever knew as a child. It may not have been the most sensible attempt in more ways than one. But it was there. And I had almost forgotten. I don’t want to forget.