John Williams’s theme from Star Wars purchased in the tiny
record shop next to the Little Caesars pizzeria, at the strip mall
with our town’s lone Chinese restaurant, House of Wong.
Every dish, Americanized: Sweet and Sour, Lemon, Almond, Orange.
No duck or chicken feet to tantalize my parents’ recent immigrant palates.
The Lone Ranger & Tonto belonged to an earlier generation.
We were lightsaber, TIE fighter boys conquering other worlds.
The moon, already ours. President Reagan’s Star Wars and evil
empires, not yet history. In the movie Star Wars, species,
not races, defined light and dark, good and evil. (Lando Calrissian
appeared later.) If the teenage store clerk had refused to sell me
that 45, I would have felt the force of good and evil sooner,
understood why House of Wong was tucked in the back, away
from the street. This isn’t nostalgia, merely a chronicle, when boys
dreamed of galaxies far, far away, and violence, merely play.