Return of the Jedi

…My ex wife, she calls wanting to know if I think Return of the Jedi is ok for our son.
It’s hard to say.

Me, I saw Jaws when I was four.
The Exorcist when I was five.
A Clockwork Orange when I was eight.

My parents, they were barely more than kids themselves.
They hardly knew what to think.

…Anyway, not knowing, I ask him what he thinks, if he thinks it may scare him.
He asks me, What are the scary parts.
I tell him about the parts that he might find scary.

He decides to watch it.

That’s what he and his mommy do.

Then he calls me back after.

No hello, but straight away: Darth Vader is Luke’s father, he tells me.

Perplexed. Trying to get his mind around it. How it is that a father comes to wear all black; what circumstances result in the idea of the son being the hero and the father the villain.

He doesn’t know what to ask, but he is anxious to understand something.

And I think about how we almost always fear things for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t mean our fear itself is wrong.

We worry about Jabba the Hut and the mouth in the desert , but its something deeper that scares our children. They see it already, the hints of real darkness in the world.

“He turned good again toward the end,” I finally offer to my son.

He’s got nothing to say to this.