I spent a lot of time in the fall of 1980 in the Belden Village Mall Waldenbooks coveting the shrink-wrapped stack of Ralph McQuarrie’s The Empire Strikes Back portfolios. Made no secret of the fact I wanted this thing for Christmas. Bad.

And I remember without a doubt that my mom had pretty much assured me that she and Dad wouldn’t be shelling out the bucks for it. I seem to remember price being a sticking point, like no way was Mom coughing up close to ten bucks for something I couldn’t even play with.

As it happened, my mom’s brother, Uncle Rob, spent that Christmas at our house. A little background: Uncle Rob was the youngest “grown-up” that I knew, which made him, you know, cool.

Uncle Rob, for example, had bought me a boxed set of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” books when I was in first grade. (I got through “The Hobbit” pretty easily, but I’ll admit it was probably fourth or fifth or maybe even sixth grade before I got through the Ring saga itself. As a little kid, those chapters about “Many Meetings” and “The Council of Elrond” seem like they go on and onnnn.) I remember Uncle Rob being stoked about the then-new Lord of the Rings cartoon movie, and taking me to see it at the theater down by the Gold Circle store. He was going to buy me one of the Gollum posters they had for sale in the lobby, but we wound up seeing the last show of the day, and when we came out of the theater, the concession stand was closed.

When he’d visit our house, Uncle Rob would camp out on the floor of my room and we’d stay up late while he told me stories about growing up with my mom on the farm over in Upper Sandusky.

When I was a little older, he introduced me to the works of Isaac Asimov and theories about multiple universes and bending space and time.

And I remember going to Uncle Rob’s college graduation and seeing the house where he lived at the time. They had a fish tank with a piranha in it and some record album cover set up behind it as a backdrop. (They also had the black-and-white cat that we’d given Uncle Rob as a kitten. He had wanted to call it “Felix,” but his roommates had overruled him and gone with “Moon Puppy.” This was the ’70s, after all.)

So when Uncle Rob came to stay with us that Christmas, I knew things were going to be fun.

Christmas morning, I open up my present from Uncle Rob, and it’s that Empire Strikes Back portfolio! I was just crazy excited because I had completely put it out of my mind, since, after all, Mom had shot it down. There weren’t as many weird pre-production ideas in the Empire paintings as there had been in the Star Wars edition, but these prints were bigger, and the 25-picture collection came with an extra sheet of paper that had information about each one. Later, I sat on my bedroom floor looking through the whole stack again and again.

Almost thirty years later, I was watching a DVD made from our old home movies, and I rediscovered that actual moment: Me clutching my pack of Empire paintings in our green-carpeted living room, jumping up to hug Uncle Rob, who, naturally, earned himself a permanent spot on my Cool List.

Want more? Listen to the essay which inspired Chapter 1 as it aired on WKSU to celebrate Star Wars' 30th birthday.