My grandmother passed away 10 years ago last January. Sadly, I didn’t realize it was ten years ago until I started hearing the buzz about the ten year anniversary of The Phantom Menace.
TPM had been such a big thing to me back in 1998 and 1999. The excitement of a new Star Wars movies was on everyone's mind. So, it was a real shock when I got that phone call late one night that my grandmother’s health was failing and my mother had checked her back into the hospital. She warned me that this might be the time to prepare for the worse although I didn't want to hear it. I wouldn't hear it. In my own rationale, I knew she would get better. She had done so in the past. See, she battled several health issues and cancer for about three years before that fateful phone call. All those times before, she got better and went back home. Yes, deep down, I knew she wasn’t that strong independent woman that had raised three kids on her own after her husband died early in life in mid-1966.
Back in the summer of 1998, I took my soon-to-be wife down to meet the family. It was that summer (and the only time) my wife met and spoke with my grandmother. At the time, she was spending a few days in the hospital and recovering from the latest treatments of her cancer. We, the family, knew she couldn’t go back home to her small apartment in Alamogordo, so it was up to me and the rest family to assist in moving her into my mother's place in Roswell. In between trips to the hospital, and with nothing better to do in New Mexico, I took my soon-to-be-wife to all the famous locales. We went to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. On the way back from White Sands, I stopped in Alamogordo and at my grandmother’s apartment. I had a Nissan truck at the time and I was going to take a few things back to Roswell that she needed and she insisted I take a few things back home with me--like the table, chairs, microwave and some dishes--all to start the new life with my soon-to-be-wife. As we finished loading up the truck, I told my wife that I needed to go back inside for a few seconds. My excuse was to make sure we got everything and lock up. Yet, my sole intent was to simply reflect. That day would be the last time I stood or sat in my grandmother’s apartment. It was the home she had made for herself for as long as I could remember. I truly don’t have any true memories of her other homes (the photos from the 70s tell me I was there but I can't remember them.) When I think of my grandmother’s house, it was that little one room apartment in Alamogordo. The apartment that so many things happened. In that apartment we watched the Space Shuttle Columbia land at White Sands Missle Range. It was that apartment that I drew countless sketches of super-heroes. It was that appartment that helped define my life as every summer I would spent many days there.
The earliest memory of that apartment would be the summer she moved in. I remember that summer very clearly. I was 9 years old and spending the summer with my grandmother as I so often did. Yet this summer she was relocating back to Alamogordo. A few weeks earlier, she had signed the paper work on the apartment and now she was able to move in. I helped her load up the car and we drove to Alamogordo. We arrived a day early so we had to stay the first night in a motel. I still remember the motel too. It was the Satellite Inn in Alamogordo. I remember the neon sign that was a planet with a bunch of star-like satellites encircling around it. We picked it mainly for its Sci-Fi reference. The room was nothing special, but I do remember begging my grandmother for a couple of quarters because the bed was one of those vibrating kind. I had never been on a vibrating bed. I still remember the coin box that was next to headboard. It looked like those you find on the penny horse at King Soopers. Long story short, she moved in and it would begin a long history of summers I would spend with her in that apartment.
It was the apartment that I sat in the floor under a fan reading comic books. I loved Alamogordo for one reason: it had a awesome newsstand that had hundreds of cool things. I remember going into town (that’s what she always called it) and going to the Yucca Newsstand. It was the only place that had hundreds of comics in wire racks. It sold coins and paperbacks too. I can still smell it--the smell of printed paper and tobacco. It also sold pipe tobacco and supplies. It was that newsstand that I saw my very first images of the new Star Wars movie called Return of the Jedi. It was an image of a incomplete Death Star and a Star Destroyer. The image was on the cover of the movie's collector magazine. My grandmother bought it for me. And I still have it to this day. I would later go back there to buy the comic adaptations of Return of the Jedi and to buy other Star Wars comics. I bought the ROTJ novelization there. I bought the ROTJ poster magazine there. It was my favorite store while I was that age. Not until a store called Greenspray Books did I love such a store. It saddens me that I wasn’t able to go back to that newsstand before it closed. If the stories are true, it closed around 2000, only a short time after my grandmother died.
So many Star Wars memories focus around my grandmother. She was the person who drove me to Kmart back in the Summer of 1983 to buy my first ROTJ action figure. It was a Gamorrean Guard. I still have it to this day (along with all my childhood SW action figures). Why I bought the Gamorrean Guard I do not know. I guess I thought the pig dude looked cool and he came with that neat meat clever-like ax. Seriously, to be more realistic, I think that was the only figure they had at the time. And I was determined to buy a ROTJ figure that day. Thus, it had to be a character from ROTJ and on a ROTJ card. Even late in 1983, the store still had dozens of the Empire Strikes Back carded figures on the shelf. Most being characters from Star Wars but on an ESB cardback.
Thus, the reason I forge this tale, is to honor my grandmother. She had so much to do with my early Star Wars memories. She entertained my Star Wars fascination then, and even when I became an adult. I wish I could have shared some stories of the new movies with her. The stories of my friends and I standing in the rain and lines at Celebration. The rushing out at midnight to buy toys. The seeing TPM five times in one day on May 19th. 1999 was definitely a very notable year--it saw the release of a new Star Wars prequel movie and my grandmother's death. It was a huge stamp in my yearbook of life. It was a time of both great joy and great sadness. I shall never forget. I remember those times not only for me, but for her...
