A Memory

It was an extraordinarily hot day.  My grandfather – who watched me and my brother during those grammar school summers – had warned us that we needed to bring something with us to keep busy.

He had to wait online at the local department of motor vehicles.

My brother brought some baseball cards to shuffle through and examine.  Me, I brought two science fiction paperbacks.

The one I remember was the novelization of a movie that just came out, a blockbuster already before the middle of summer: Star Wars.  Though the front cover said something to the effect of “a novel by George Lucas,” I learned much later that it was ghost-written by one of my favorite ghost writers of the movie novelizations of my youth: Alan Dean Foster.

We spent two, maybe three hours in that crowded, air-condition-free government building.  I perched on a windowsill, catlike, absorbed in a couple of chapters of Star Wars.  This was before I saw the movie in the theaters with my parents.  It was probably more vivid, more fantastic, more magical in my nine-year-old imagination, and the time whooshed by.

I should read that book again, for nostalgia’s sake.