A Long Time Ago: Growing Up With And Out Of Star Wars by Gib van Ert

Author:Gib van Ert
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Soi-disant press
Published: 2012-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

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Star Wars, and popular movies in general, are routinely described as a form of escapism. That concept has little application to a four-year-old boy, however. In early childhood, fantasy and reality are places on the same continuum. Learning to distinguish between the two is one of the things we mean by growing up. Even as the distinction becomes apparent, however, a happy child does not need to escape from reality. Fantasy is a pleasure, not a refuge. Neither Star Wars nor Empire was escapism for me. But in the years between Empire and Jedi, I did have something to escape from. My parents’ fortunes, and their marriage, were increasingly strained.

My father changed jobs nearly as often as my mother changed religions. He was a bank teller, a debt collector, a car salesman, an event photographer, an ice cream man, a car salesman again (now at a different dealership), a real estate agent, and more. Some of the jobs my father switched in and out of were joint efforts between my mother and father to start their own business, a would-be solution to their financial problems which allowed my mother to express her creativity while also accommodating my father’s constitutional inability to be anyone’s employee. My mother increasingly felt that if my sister and I were to have any stability and security in our lives, she was going to have to provide it herself. She would have to become the income-earner. From this realization it was only a short step to divorce, a prospect she began to look forward to as eagerly as I awaited Return of the Jedi. Arguments between my parents increased in frequency and unpleasantness, though thankfully without ever being drunken or violent. While I did not appreciate it at the time, the frequent trips my mother, sister and I made to Dallas were not only to visit my grandparents but to give my mother some respite from her failing marriage.

One consequence of my parents’ financial troubles in the early 1980s was that we moved house every year or so. The worst place we lived, from an aesthetic and perhaps even a hygienic perspective, was the former front office of a twenty-room, 1950s-era motel. The old motel rooms, situated behind our unit in an L-shape with parking spots in front of each door, were rented out to people in even worse straits than us. My sister and I were forbidden to go back there, and we did not want to. There were no children there (mercifully), only oddballs, hard luck cases and rough characters—men who did not wear as many clothes as the weather demanded, and women who did not mind. All this was directly behind us, connected to our home by walls and ceiling. The sensation I most associate with living there was a determination to keep looking forward, not to turn around, not to look back.

The motel-house had one thing going for it, namely that it was directly across the street from Penticton’s greatest attraction: the long, golden-sanded beaches of Okanagan Lake.

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