Holding Vader's Leash

The camper and driveway must be punished.


our niece Josceline, 1002 hours this morning


Sarah and Jeffrey got to go camping with Josceline and their grandpa Robert and grandma Sharon this weekend at Totten Trail about an hour south of us. Various family remembers came to visit between Wednesday when they arrived and Sunday when they came home (Martha and I couldn't due to our work schedules, and Sarah came home with her aunt, Martha's sister Mary, Friday due to her asthma acting up AND she told us she wanted to spend time with just us ... I can't stay mad or hurt about that). But Sunday afternoon when Robert, Sharon, Josceline, Sarah -- yes, she wanted to go back for a while Sunday, and our niece Breanna took her there after she got off work -- and Jeffrey came back in the camper, Sharon had a nasty fall when she was carrying some dishes and stepped down from inside the camper ... and missed a step, or somehow lost her footing and landed on her right side. Blood came gushing from the right side of her face and her left thumb after she fell on


the concrete driveway and the family at the house freaked out. This is what I'm told; Martha and I first heard that Sharon had to go to the hospital when Jeffrey called us on Mary's phone. Martha and I headed there first and found Sharon, Robert, and Martha's sister Margaret already in the room where Sharon was laying (got to remember lay and lie) down and she was being evaluated. She was able to come home from Trinity later Sunday night, praise the Lord, but yesterday she had a follow-up appointment as well as a visit with a hand specialist ... bear with me, I am simplifying this but I don't  know all that's going on myself. As of this morning, I saw Sharon laying on the couch with a cast over her lower right arm because she'd broken her wrist in the fall and a cast was over her left thumb because now the nail is completely gone. The swelling around her right eye has gone down a bit, but for a while now she will need help for she can't close her hands. Help, and prayer.


And Josceline's opening line today brings to mind WWVD -- what would [Darth] Vader do -- if he'd taken such a pratfall. Maybe a little dust on the armor, but I can imagine after or even on his way to rising he'd be Force-crushing the camper, breaking the sidewalk, and likely inducing pain in whoever happened to be nearby. Anger does that to you. In James Luceno's latest Star Wars novel, Star Wars: Tarkin (ISBN 9780345511522) along with the "good" bad guys of the Galactic Empire Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine -- who gets referred to more often here as Darth Sidious, his prequel ID -- we have the arguable co-architect of the galaxy in the fallout from the Clone Wars, the one who doesn't make it through a complete movie, Grand Moff Tarkin. The novel's set five years after the end of Revenge of the Sith (14 BBY, for the Expanded fans) and there's still lingering pockets of resistance to the order the Empire purports to bring, sometimes rather brutally.


While it's a stretch to say Tarkin comes out as the hero of this story -- which also expands on his own background, and like Sidious and Vader he too comes from an outlying world, one that outside of its capital city was unforgiving of the weak and fearful -- the fact he's willing and able to use whatever means are at his disposal (and with the resources of the Empire, they're considerable) and does not give a rip what you think of him ... makes him a little more real. Tarkin's not a Jedi, he rose through the ranks in the Republic and the Empire and after the rebels -- not the Rebel Alliance (or should it be "rebel" Alliance? We'll go into that another day) -- whose actions trail through this story gets quashed, he goes back to his job of getting the Death Star done, and you know these battle stations that can destroy entire planets take time. But the title line today, and I leave it to you faithful to discern the context from the first Star Wars movie, comes to mind as the best snark I've ever heard!


Happy Birthday to Barack Obama, David 

Comments

Popular Posts