South Away by Meaghan Marie Hackinen

Author:Meaghan Marie Hackinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781988732640
Publisher: NeWest Press
Published: 2019-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

WHILE IT WAS MY FATHER WHO INTRODUCED ME to sci-fi, my mother was the one who insisted that we go, just she and I, to see A New Hope when it was re-released for the franchise’s 20th anniversary. This was 1997, two years before Jar Jar Binks would become a loathed household name. I’d never seen any of the Star Wars trilogy, didn’t know my mother was even a fan. And I’m not sure why it was just the two of us. Perhaps Alisha wasn’t interested; perhaps Dad had hockey practice.

It wasn’t spur of the moment, either. She set the date, a Friday night. We arrived early to beat the crowds, and the two of us shared a bag of popcorn doused in butter and a Rolo, her favourite candy bar.

I adored every minute of it. From the opening text to Princess Leia’s cinnamon-bun hair rolls, to the Rebels’ final X-wing attack on the Death Star. I was captivated.

“I knew you’d love it,” my mother had said as we shouldered our way through the crowd, out of the cinema and into the parking lot. “I totally called it.”

“How did you know?” I had said, still in a buttery-haze. The afterglow of Luke’s lightsaber was slicing though my thoughts like the car lights stabbing darkness around us.

“I remember how I felt when I first saw it,” she had said. “I knew you’d feel the same.”

It had scared me that she could look inside me so easily, know exactly what I desired. What I craved. Some Jedi mind trick. And still, like the time she painted the house while Alisha and I were away camping with our father, I wondered what I actually knew about her—what were her interests? My father, he was easy to pin down. An open book. He played hockey like an addict, took us to the ski hill nearly every weekend in the winter, and always had some backyard project on the go. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to lack any passion aside from gardening until she quit smoking and became a Canucks fan. She used her cigarette money to buy Pavel Bure jerseys and home game tickets, and made a cake in anticipation of their 1994 Stanley Cup win against the New York Rangers. (We let it sit in the fridge for five days after they lost.) The sad truth is, I’d often assumed my mother was just boring: a woman without interests. A mother.

But after that night she took me to see A New Hope, I was forced to reconsider. I wondered, as we drove home from the theatre, if it was possible that my mother used to be cool. Perhaps I’d misjudged her, and the reason she didn’t seem to do anything had more to do with a forty-hour workweek and chaperoning her two kids around than anything else.

Thinking about my mother now, it strikes me that she’s always been an avid reader, devouring paperback classics and never discouraged, like I’ve been, by

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