Training camp begins tomorrow and here I wait, sitting on my living room couch, watching Star Wars with my dad. I'm simultaneously anxious, excited (the term "geeking out" seems appropriate given the movie playing in the background) and queasy.
But the time is right, and the tension seems the same as that which sits thick in the air the moment before you turn the final page of the first chapter of a book, right before the rising action begins. The stage has been set, the characters have been introduced, and everyone can tell that something is going to happen. The precarious balance of homeostasis in the world of the story can't remain the way it is because something is screaming toward it, meteoric in its approach, devastatingly earth-shattering in its ability to require the protagonists to change, to adapt, to prepare themselves.
Sometimes it's a seemingly random and commonplace event that begins the story. For Luke, his Uncle buys two beat up and near-obsolete droids from a group of scavenging, scamming Jawas, the used car salesmen of Tatooine. One of them runs away into the Jundland Wastes where Luke gets beat up by Tusken Raiders and meets Obi-Wan Kenobi. And the rest is history – Death Star, Dagobah, "I am your father," the whole nine yards.
But it all begin with that one little rising action, that tiny little incident: R5-D4, the astromech droid that Owen Lars meant to purchase, had a bad motivator. R2-D2 was instead purchased, stolen data plans and all, and nearly thirty-five years later, the story of Luke Skywalker is still going strong (for anyone who ever read the novels like me, you know that arguably some of his most triumphant moments come after he defeats and redeems Darth Vader – I mean, c'mon, he fought a CLONE of himself).
Tusken Raiders, also known as Sand People, are a nomadic people of the otherwise uninhabited deserts of Tatooine. A technologically primitive culture, dependent on stealing and looting more advanced civilization's weapons and gear, they have no written language and instead rely on tribe bards to relay verbally the history of their people. When the time comes to train up a new bard, the old one teaches carefully the story of their people, and every word, every grunt and snarl and squeal of their guttural language, must be reproduced perfectly or the trainee is deemed unfit for the position and replaced.
I've been waiting for the moment where my proverbial R5 rumbles forward and fizzles out in a puff of smoke and broken parts. The Sand People understand how important a story is; so do I. I want this story that I am a part of to be powerful, moving, beautiful enough to be retold over and over again by tribal bards for generations.
And I think that tomorrow, when I hop into a car with a total stranger, and then arrive in Tennessee to meet a bunch of other total strangers with whom I will be spending the better part of the next year. We'll sleep in tents and live out of backpacks and try not to get mosquito-born diseases while serving people with no clean water, who live on less than a dollar a day, who have leprosy and have lost to death and war half of the children born to them.
With elements like that rattling around inside the story of our lives, there are bound to be some broken droid parts popping out soon. And then what kind of story will we be launched into?
Here's to finding out.
