Home sweet home, sort of...

Where to begin?

I spent two months on Naboo. Not entirely by choice. I've lived on Tatooine for over 40 years, and this was my first time off the planet since then. Partly, the issue was money. It's very expensive to travel that far. It's also been an issue of leaving the farm for any amount of time. There are people who watch other people's businesses for a living, but I'd never been willing to let someone do that. And even if I had, Naboo has been a hassle to get on and off of ever since the fall of the Republic, thanks to heavy Empire security. I was afraid there might be problems with my changed name - I never updated my passport.

And, finally, there's the old Jedi adage, "you can't go home again." Jedi were typically separated from their families at a very young age, and the few who actually remembered their early friends and family and reunited with them many years later (either because they left the order, got kicked out, or simply found themselves on their homeworld by chance) after such a long absence found it to be a very unsatisfactory, disorienting experience.

I'm hardly a Jedi, but travel problems and slow or unreliable mail (even electronic mail) have limited my communication to Naboo. I've kept in touch with my parents and my sisters, but news of other relatives and old friends have mostly been due to my family's propensity for gossip.

So, when one of my cousins took sick, I was quite surprised to find that she had requested my company. Although it's customary on many planets to bequeath your personal fortune to your survivors, it's more common on Naboo to blow it all during your last days whenever possible. Very often, this means summoning loved ones from all corners of the galaxy to your deathbed, at your own expense.

Well, Jalyn had summoned me, and paid for my first-class travel fare. I hadn't heard from her since my going-away party, but we were very close as children. We had lost two other cousins and several other relatives since then, but (thanks to slow mail) I didn't know about their deaths until some time later. So, I was surprised and touched that she wanted to see me now.

I scrambled to find a caretaker for my farm, and I downgraded my fare to tourist class to help cover the cost. Truthfully, although the circumstances were sad, I was excited, if nervous, to be getting away for a little while. I had been missing Onegee far more than is normal for a human to miss any droid, the fish farm was becoming a disaster, and I was getting stressed out. (Apparently, the more aggressively you try to minimize your stress, the more aggressively it competes for your attention.)

As excited as I was, the impending trip also filled me with dread. I knew that people and places would not be as I remembered them, and I tried to prepare myself for that. What worried me more was that I would not be as my friends and family remembered me. My appearance had certainly changed - 40+ years of Tatooine sunshine and wind will do a number on your skin, above and beyond the normal ravages of time - but I wasn't sure if I was even the same person inside. The things that were important or familiar to me as a lazy teen had long ago been replaced by concerns about vaporators and atmospheric monitoring and Tusken raiders. What would we even talk about?

On the other hand... what if it turned out to be so great that I didn't ever want to come back to Tatooine, with my run-down old farm, the sorry fish venture, and piles and piles of worthless sand?

All of that worrying had been mostly for nothing. Sure, the whole planet looked completely different from how I remembered it, or even from the old pictures I'd put away long ago. Homes had been refurbished and redecorated; entire city blocks had been transformed over the years; even historical buildings had been renovated just enough to confuse me. My family and the friends I visited were all older, grayer, and shaped differently, and there were new family members I'd never seen before. And indeed, our interests and experiences had diverged greatly over the years. Still, we found no shortage of things to talk about, and except for the first few awkward but giddy moments, it was as if no time had passed at all.

At least not with my family. Meeting with some of my old friends was a different story. There were some pleasant reunions, but there were some weird ones too, including two that were downright unpleasant. One old friend tried to recruit me into his "business" (a pyramid scheme) and another tried to recruit me into her new religion (also something of a pyramid scheme, in my opinion). Those were sad, but they didn't overshadow all the fun I had with my other friends.

I spent most of my time with my cousin, though. She had been told that her condition was terminal, but she demanded treatment anyway, even while she was settling her affairs. She seemed to be as committed to living as she was resigned to dying, but the treatments bought her some time. She wasn't even close to recovering by the end of my visit, but she did seem to be doing a little better.

I worried that being away from Tatooine for so long would cause me to lose focus on the important things in my life, but I could not have been more wrong. It gave me some much-needed objectivity. I realized that the fish farm had been a horrible idea, and that I needed to cut my losses rather than continue to pump money into a losing proposition in hopes of winning it all back at increasingly poor odds. I decided to stop waffling about the droid situation and just buy one that I liked and get it over with.

More important, I figured out something that had never completely dawned on me before: I didn't have to define myself as Naboo or former-Naboo or Career Quest booby-prize winner or moisture farmer or anything else. I was just me, J. Sandstormer (a name I had chosen for myself), doing particular things in a particular place. The past was the past: part of me, but not all of me; only as much of me as I wanted it to be.

When I say it that way, it doesn't sound like anything. Actually, it seems pretty stupid. But it seemed like a major revelation at that moment. Maybe it was the Corellian vodka.

I used my SORAS credits to buy a reconditioned One-Onegee droid. I powered up the new droid at my parents' house, just to test it out. My sisters' kids were curious as to why a farmer needs a second-rate medical droid, and I had a hard time explaining about my shaky hands, but the droid seemed to amuse them. It was weird having it around, though - it seemed out of place. I guess I'm not used to seeing droids mixing with humans socially. After a few hours, I turned the new Onegee off.

It was tough saying goodbye to everyone, but it wasn't as hard as I had expected. Contrary to my fears, my old life had no hold over me at all. I looked forward to returning to Tatooine.

I had second thoughts about that when I got home. The caretaker I hired had done an adequate job of managing the business, but there were messages from a few customers who had some concerns. All the fish had died, and Kane and Dofi didn't know what to do. Luke had finally completed work on his skyhopper, and Beru and Owen were beside themselves with worry (not my problem, actually, but they needed to vent, and I was their favorite person to vent to). Kenobi's friend Fil was MIA. And a gravel storm had done some costly damage to my property - naturally, since I already was dealing with the expense of the caretaker, fish farm, droid fare, etc.

With Onegee II's help, however, I got the farm back into shape quickly, reassured my customers, and mostly fixed the damaged repulsor field myself (I still had to pay someone to do the rest of the repairs, but it wasn't so bad). I then cheered up Beru (Owen can't be cheered, ever), sold my share in the fish farm to Biggs (don't ask), and... get this... started a bowling league. There wasn't anything I could do about Fil, but I thought Kenobi might enjoy a new hobby. (I was wrong, but that's a story for another day.)

I have more to say, but it's getting late. The important thing is, I'm home, I'm sandy and gray and sweaty, and I couldn't be happier.