Love is a fairly amazing thing, but I suppose we all know that by now; it’s most unlikely that so much of our poetry, cinema and popular music would be devoted to the subject if it were something mundane. Among all of the myriad characteristics of this concept we call love, the most remarkable is its ability to grow anew in fields thought long ago to be sewn with salt. Indeed, the deepest, truest, most intense love affair of my life—which had, I thought, long ago been rendered nothing more than a pile of spent ashes—now blazes again with the intensity of the desert sun. And it all started up again because of a trip to the grocery store in 2005.

The original tenure of this love affair lasted from my very early childhood until the spring of 1999. It was that May when my heart was first broken into pieces and my passion began to slip out through the cracks. In the years that followed, you might hardly have realized that the love had ever been there. I remained on good terms with and even fond of that which had originally captivated me so, but all the power, intensity and—most importantly—excitement had drained away. It eventually reached the point where I didn’t even care if the thing that had won my heart continued or not. It was a sad time for me. I barely knew what I was living for. And then, as I said before, I went to the grocery store.

Oh, how what I saw there made my heart soar! The chips, the cookies, the crackers, the candy…all of it was emblazoned with pictures of my beloved. Ordinary M&Ms came with pictures of robe-clade Jedi candies on the package; the new dark chocolate variety showed a yellow M&M decked out in full Darth Vader regalia. Wookiees could be seen smiling at me from bottles of Diet Pepsi and Yoda gazed at me from a package of Sierra Mist. See-Threepio practically demanded I eat his Cheez-Its. Ordinary cereals were revamped with various characters, and a brand new Star Wars cereal stood in a display all its own. Even the store’s magazine sections had a hefty Star Wars feel; actors were emblazoned on almost every cover, promising interviews and behind the scenes info to be found within the pages. The book rack, too, was dominated by that galaxy far, far away, with more copies of the novelization of Revenge of the Sith and young readers’ editions of each of the six films than any one man could count.

I hadn’t even wanted to become interested in the release of Revenge of the Sith. I just didn’t care about new Star Wars anymore. To paraphrase Grand Moff Tarkin, its fire had gone out of my universe. When I saw the two trailers, I began to get excited, even though I knew I could only be disappointed by the film. Even with this excitement, however, the love—the absolute blind adulation—for anything I saw with the Star Wars logo slapped on it was long gone.

But going into the grocery store changed all that. This close to the release of the film, I’d expect to be bombarded by Mace Windus and Boba Fetts at a toy store. Star Wars and toys have an excellent and long standing relationship. But a grocery store? The most exciting thing I expect to see there is a purple-haired old lady holding up a line of increasingly irate people by very slowly writing a check. I thought I’d bop in, pick up my frozen fish sticks, and bop out. Instead, Star Wars hammered me from every direction, and I thought to myself: Man, this next one must really be something special.

An entire grocery store doesn’t go completely nuts over the release of just any old movie. For almost every packaged food product in sight to get a total makeover…well, it takes something with damn near the power of an Olympian god to do that. Even the toy stores I mentioned earlier went above and beyond; it isn’t every day you can get Mr. Potato Head to put on a black helmet and cape and wield a lightsaber. And as I thought about what this huge amount of tie-ins in the most unexpected of places must mean about the film itself, something began to stir within me. You might say this Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day. Whatever happened within me, the end result was undeniable: My love, admiration and constant excitement for the Star Wars universe returned.

I counted down the days until the picture came out. Every few minutes, my thoughts returned to what I hoped the movie would be like, what surprises it would have in store. I hadn’t been this excited about Star Wars since I was a little kid, seeing the movies for the very first time. The magic had been recaptured; the heartache caused by the first two prequels all but forgotten, and I was ready once more to walk down the theater aisle and spend two hours with my loved one. The negative feelings I had for the franchise were gone. My heart had nothing but the highest of hopes for Revenge of the Sith, and even if my brain was trying to tell me I was setting myself up for disappointment, my heart could beat far louder than my brain could think. Of course, it turned out that the movie sucked just as bad as I thought it would. But it didn’t cripple me like the other two had, because I was able to remember the joy I felt seeing all the Star Wars crap in that store. I was able to hold on to the magic.

And let me tell you, it feels good to have that magic back. I’m four years old again and pretending the cardboard tube from inside a roll of wrapping paper is a lightsaber. Any time I walk under a tree I can be on Endor and any time I’m not standing on grass I can be on Tatooine—and it’s every bit as real and true to me now as it was all those years ago. When I’m sitting alone, I wonder if Lobot could take Boba Fett in a one-on-one fight. I imagine what would happen if Chief Chirpa should die. Which Ewok would take over? The obvious choice would be Wicket, but I’m sure Logray would feel he was entitled to some recognition, and no doubt Paploo could make a strong case for himself and use the story of his heroic stealing of an Imperial speeder bike to garner support. I think about all these things and it’s all important to me again. I want to play with my old Star Wars toys and my new Star Wars Pez dispensers. I want to put on a brown bathrobe and try to talk like Alec Guinness. The fact that the movie was terrible didn’t rob me of that because when I watched Revenge of the Sith, I wasn’t just watching that. I was three or four, watching the original trilogy on rented videos with my dad for the first time. I was twelve, sitting in the theater with my dad and watching the Special Editions on the big screen. I was running through my neighborhood on a day when school was cancelled because of snow, pretending with all the kids on the block that we were battling Imperials on the remote ice world of Hoth. I was opening my very own copies of the original trilogy on Christmas morning. I was bursting with excitement while I waited in line with my friend to see The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars movie in my lifetime. I was doing all of that and more while I watched the final entry in the movie series that has, more than anything else, defined who I am.

But, most importantly, I was—and still am, truly-madly-deeply—in love.

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