Goodbye, Spock

If you know me at all, you know that I do not keep up on celebrity anything. I really couldn't care any less about the size of Kim's bottom or the colour of her hair, or who won the Oscars or who is dating whomever.

But this past week, Spock died. And I was a little taken aback at how much it bothered me. To borrow his phrase, it was . . . illogical. And fascinating. Because I know that Spock is a fictitious character in a hopelessly outdated and cheesy series that lived only three years, and was finished before I was even born. Still, it is so. I felt downright melancholy.

I discovered Star Trek in the reruns of the reruns. I was in my late teens. We had our very first ever TV. It was actually an Apple computer monitor which my brothers and I hooked up to bunny ears. Then we strung wires from the bunny ears and wove the wires through the wire mesh of the screen in my bedroom window. I don't know if there's any possibility that it made the picture clearer, but we thought it did. And then we would crowd into my bedroom and watch this cool show about Kirk and McCoy and Spock, exploring strange new worlds, going bravely where no man had gone before. We kept the volume down. We thought we'd get into trouble. We didn't want my mom to discover that we'd figured out a way to turn the monitor into a TV, let alone that we were watching this space show.

She discovered us one day. She stuck her head in, and stood and watched for about thirty seconds, and said, "Oh, Star Trek." And walked out. We stared at each other in outright astonishment. Mom knew about Star Trek? And she was ok with us watching it? No way! (I still don't know how that happened.) After that, we watched it openly. We still strung the wires up. It seemed we got the best reception from that upstairs bedroom facing Toronto.

Eventually, the monitor-comme-TV moved downstairs onto the dining room table. We got a real TV. We set up a tower antenna and could get more channels. When I moved out, I got cable. Now I could watch The Next Generation. It wasn't as good. Because Data wasn't Spock.

I haven't watched Star Trek in years. I haven't even thought about Star Trek in years. But when I read in the paper that Leonard Nimoy had died, I was shocked. Spock was dead. For good this time. There would be no Star Trek III to bring him back to life. He was gone. And I realised how much Spock had meant to me.

I was an awkward, angry, out-of-place kid at that time. I loved learning, especially about things I wanted to learn about. I read voraciously. I was known by first name at the public library, and signed out armloads of books at once. I would spend hours in the library, reading encyclopedias about whatever struck my interest at that time. These were the days before Google. I would hook onto a topic and learn as much as I could about it. While all the other girls my age were off studying how to put on make-up and fancy clothes, and how to flirt with boys, I was reading about the Monitor and the Merrimack, about the real mutiny on the Bounty, and about Grey Owl.

I was an introvert in a house full of extroverts. I wanted to be in my bedroom, reading, naturally. That made me anti-social and a loner. The younger me sat in the school playground, back against a wall, nose in a book. I was always being told to put my books away and play with the other kids. My desire, even my need, to be alone caused all kinds of problems. I didn't know about introversion or extroversion. I just knew that normal people liked being with other people, and people who wanted or needed to be alone were weird, anti-social misfits.

I loved fixing things. I didn't really see the point in crying about something if I could fix it. I made decisions logically, based on what was practical, pragmatic, or the right thing to do. In a large, extended family that "discussed" issues at top volume and heated passion, I quickly learned that logic and sense don't necessarily rule the day; passion and volume did.

I learned to blend in. I learned to be loud and passionate. I learned to put on a great extroverted face, which I could maintain for a while. I could never stifle my love for learning, but I did learn to not talk about it. I emotionally hung around on the fringes, talking sort of sensibly about the things that everyone else was talking about, but never talking about the things that really interested me. But the real me, the inside me, the me that longed for silence and solitude, conversations about big ideas, and the quiet and sensible solution to problems was dying behind my mask.

And then I met Spock.

He was brilliant. And a loner. And logical. And dispassionate in crisis. He still managed to care. I could see it. It showed in his actions. He was loyal to death. "I am, and always will be, your friend." Bones thought he was a freak. But anyone with half a brain could see that he was the anchor who held the Enterprise together. He didn't quite fit in, but he didn't care. He just was who he was, and when Bones went off, he cocked an eyebrow and carried on. He never changed who he was to placate the irrational and emotional doctor.

I didn't realise, all those years ago when I was watching Spock on TV, what I realised the moment I read the headline that Leonard Nimoy had died: the man from Vulcan was my first glimmer that the inside me was ok. It was ok to be an introvert. It was ok to love reading and research, and to have a headful of random facts, none of which involved makeup or fashion or interior design. It was ok to think through a decision rather than to feel through it. I was ok. It took many more years and a whole lot of real, live, flesh-and-red-blood people who love me and cheer me on for me to be comfortable with that, but Mr Spock opened my eyes to the idea that I could be ok. I think that if God can use a donkey to talk to someone, maybe he could use even a fictitious half-alien to reach one of his lost children who needed a glimmer of hope.

My hope is strong today. I hadn't thought of Spock in years. But I'm glad he was there when I was 16.

Goodbye, Spock.