Pablo's list of the 20 scariest Star Wars moments got me thinking about my own most frightful Star Wars memory. As befits the season, I'm sharing it here.

When I was four years old in 1979, Star Wars was one of only three live action movies I had seen in the theater with my parents. I had an abiding love for it almost immediately. I had never seen grown ups react so strongly to anything I myself enjoyed. Before the Kenner figures hit the stores I begged my Mom to sew little brown and white outfits for my Fisher Price Adventure figures, to make them look like Luke, Leia, and Ben Kenobi, and I made believe a speedboat was Luke's landspeeder.

Now in those days nobody knew what Vader looked like under his mask. He wasn't Luke's father, he had never been a kid with Tiger Beat good looks. We didn't even know if he was a person. He was a complete mystery, and entirely terrifying.

I didn't know just how much until the morning of my fourth birthday party.

It was just a party for myself, immediate family, my best friend Dave, and a couple of the neighbor kids. As my mom and my grandma set up, Dave and I sat on the floor in my bedroom, losing ourselves in action figure play (probably Star Wars figures - no GI Joe yet).

It was around noon or so when my mom came into the room and said,

"Hey Ed...come here a minute. Somebody's here to see you."

"Who is it?"

"It's a surprise."

So I got up, thinking maybe one of my cousins or an uncle had showed up unexpectedly, probably concentrating more of getting back to playing than anything else.

Getting to the front door in our house necessitated getting through the kitchen to a closed inner door that led to the foyer (I used to play 'airlock' in there in later years, fighting not to get sucked out the door into the tree laden void of the front yard).

So I bounced ahead of my mom to the kitchen door, and opened it as the same time as somebody coming in. In that way, I ducked in and bumped into the newcomer.

My face went into their belly and I looked up....

...and Darth Vader was looking down at me over the winking lights of his chestplate.

Darth Vader. Black, towering, the lenses of his mask completely alien and expressionless, like looking up into two blank TV screens and yet knowing someone was watching you on the other side of them.

Now, this is one of the most vivid memories from my childhood. I can clearly recall a feeling of helplessness, like my whole world had suddenly shattered into a million pieces. Being an only child I had a pretty strong sense of imagination. I think every kid knows deep down the difference between fantasy and reality without being told. But in that instant, when that enormous caped figure in gleaming black peered down at me, everything came crashing down. I had suddenly stepped out of a child's world of easy familiarity into this senseless state of 'unreality' where I was not safe. In my mind up to that point, scary things didn't happen during the day. They crept in long shadows or perched in trees at night. If they did happen in the daylight, their evil was confined to dark movie houses or the clearly defined boundaries of television screens. But in that instant, even in the light of day, in my own kitchen, with my mother standing behind me, Darth Vader was standing there. The guy who had killed Ben Kenobi and all those Rebel pilots.

In horror movies you see people scream in terror. Personally, I've never been scared enough by anything to do that (well, since). I don't shriek on roller coasters, and I've gone over white foamy waterfalls in a rubber raft and never uttered a sound. But this one time, I screamed high and long from deep down in my belly, and I did an about face and ran the length of my kitchen back to my bedroom (still screaming - I mean, Drew Barrymore style), swerved back into my room and slid in one deft motion under my bed. There I curled up in a whimpering ball, my cheek pressed against the cool wall, ignoring my buddy Dave's insistent;

"What? What?"

A couple minutes later, Dave found out 'what,' when he went out in the kitchen. He did fine until Vader picked him up (I saw the home video footage much later), and then he was next to me under the bed for the remainder of my party.

Ah, almost. You might think something like this scarred me at my core or landed me at therapy or something. But nah, later on my mom came in to tell me Darth Vader was sitting in the living room with Glen and Kristen from next door and he had taken his mask off.

Curiosity got the better of me and Dave then, and we just about raced to the living room to peek at him. Well, he wasn't oozing pus or partially skeletonized and his eyes weren't bloodshot or glowing unearthly red.

He was just some guy my parents had found that had a costume, of course. But these were the days before the 501st, when nobody had one one, and nobody you knew knew anybody who had one either. I mean, this guy was featured in our local newspaper. He sat on a chair with the kids (some of them kids I didn't even know who had seen him in costume in the yard and buzzed about on their BMX bikes passing the word E.T. fashion until every unoccupied kid from age 5-17 in a two mile radius was in our living room -ah, the 70's were the good old days) all kneeling or sitting around him like disciples, asking him how the Millenium Falcon flew, what did the Sand People look like under their wrappings, and dozens of other breathless queries he had no possible way of knowing the answer to. But, he gave a good impression of knowledgability. I guess he was probably the first hardcore Star Wars fan I ever met. We tried on his mask, he passed around his lightsaber (sort of like how the police officer who visited our elementary school would pass around his handcuffs and baton).

It wound up being a great birthday.

But boy, it sure had an inauspicious start.