Last Night at the Halfmoon

My name is unusual, especially here on the West Coast, where very few of us speak French, even as a second language. But I've learned to live with the bungled pronunciation, the questions and the raised eyebrows. The story, which I've perfected over the years, is both simple and complicated at the same time. It begins, as has every important event in my life, at the Halfmoon Drive-In in Halfmoon Bay on the Sunshine Coast, just north of Vancouver. It's a place accessible only by water even though it's on the mainland, which might account for a lot of things. And when I sayeveryevent, I'm not kidding. My mother tells me I was conceived at the drive-in, and I believe her. So the story begins. I was born in April of 1962, nine months almost to the day after the drive-in opened and six months after my parents were married in the registry office on the mainland. They're happy--happier than most I'd have to say. I still want their relationship to be dark and dramatic--a feeling left over from my teenage years--but it's not. They're romantic comedy,notdrama. While I am a foreign film, something indecipherable and gloomy, in black and white rather than color. I like to say that I'm different and I want to be. My name is Aimee Anouk King, pronounced as "Amy" by everyone except my best friend, T.J.; my ex-husband, Brad, and my parents. I'm named after Anouk Aimee, though I suspect--based on my dad's current movie preferences--he would rather have named me Gidget. I see my mom's fine hand in my name and I am only glad that she didn't call me Anouk. I live down the street from the drive-in and around the corner from Mom and Dad. I'm closing in on fifty, I have an eleven-year-old son, a very nice ex-husband, and the world as I know it is coming to an end. I don't know if I can explain this to you, the way I feel about the closing of the Halfmoon. I never worked there-- though almost every teenager in Halfmoon Bay did at one time or another. I'm not really a movie buff. I just see whatever--and I meanwhatever--is on at the drive-in. But I can count the number of Saturday nights I haven't been at the Halfmoon on my fingers and toes. There were a few weeks of vacation, the night Hayden was born--I followed, of course, in Mom's footprints when I named my child--and the one summer the year I turned thirty, when the drive-in was closed for renovations. So the Halfmoon Drive-In is closing, and if I had the money to fight the developers for the land, I'd buy it and run it myself. Because I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with myself on Saturday nights without it. Hayden is getting to the age where he'd probably be just as happy to play games on the computer on Saturday night. But me? I remember the years when seven or eight of ustage of the carload discount. I try to forget the years I didn't have dates but went anyway with girlfriends or my parents. I think about the years when Hayden was young enough to sleep in the back while Brad and I watched the double feature, and the few years since Brad left for the mainland. Since then, I've watched Hayden, too, come to love the drive-in. And now all of those years are coming to an end. I'm simplifying this because I don't want to admit the reality--that the Halfmoon means so much more to me than just someplace to go on a Saturday night. This sounds stupid coming from a woman who lives in one of the most beautiful places in the world, loves her parents, has a perfect child and a devoted following for the pottery she makes in the studio in her backyard, but the Halfmoon Drive-In feels like home to me. And I'm not sure what I'll do without it. On the WaterfrontMy mother loves to tell the story of my conception, and you can imagine how much I hated that as a teenager. She generally savesAustin, Kate is the author of 'Last Night at the Halfmoon ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373881338 and ISBN 0373881339.