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I miss DeForest Kelley, too.
There’s not a lot of background required on this one. If you know me at all, you probably texted me Friday before last when news of this event broke.
In a very, very small way, Leonard Nimoy bailed me out with the timing of his passing. That Friday morning I was desperately trying to finish a column that I desperately hated and had gone to work thinking that I and the Ahwatukee Foothills News would be better served if I just mailed in the kitchen trash.
So I’m sitting in a conference call and my cell phone buzzes and I idly turn it over and there’s the news about Mr. Nimoy. It’s still sinking in. And I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m not distraught, but I’m sad.
And the column I was supposed to write? Wrote itself during my lunch hour. (Note: you can read the whole column below; however, my wonderful editor put a nice pic of Mr. N on the website with the original)
I’ve seen Leonard Nimoy a few times at conventions and he was just a delightful, interesting person to listen to. Dad, Interrupted and I took the boys up to Vegas a couple of years back for a con that he was attending; in fact, it was his next-to-last appearance ever at one of these shindigs.
The boys, who are ardent Trek fans, were suitably impressed by the convention and very impressed by Mr. Nimoy, who showed us his Bruno Mars video and for good measure, threw in the video from his Bilbo Baggins hit.
I know Leonard Nimoy isn’t a Vulcan; he just helped define them. But a little part of me was hoping, just hoping that we’d discover later that he really was, and that he’d live for the couple hundred years.
Gosh, I’m gonna miss him.
Posted: Saturday, March 7, 2015 1:43 pm
Fun Fact About Getting Old: When you’re old enough to be a grandmother you generally don’t want to admit that you still cry every time you watch Mr. Spock die at the end of “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan.”
You don’t want to admit it because Mr. Spock isn’t actually real, which you already knew unless you’ve been living under a rock or are my grandmother. If your home is actually composed of igneous matter or you’re the reincarnation of our beloved Bessie, Mr. Spock was a central character, if not THE central character in the long-running “Star Trek” television and film franchise.
Fun Fact About Star Trek Fans: We all know that know Mr. Spock isn’t real. We don’t care. We still cry at the end of that movie.
To an angst-ridden teenager in the mid-’70s (weren’t we all?) with a major bias towards science fiction and nerdiness Mr. Spock, an alien from the planet Vulcan, was coolly implacable in the face of danger, immune to love-struck drama, and unapologetic about his rampant geekiness.
In short, many things that 15-year-old me would have loved to have been.
Because of Leonard Nimoy’s portrayal of Mr. Spock, I spent countless hours in my parents’ backyard sitting in the grass, watching the night sky and wishing I could serve in Starfleet and be on a starship and never have to worry about whether I’d be asked to prom and never have to sweat an algebra test again. The threat of getting blasted into smithereens by a Klingon Bird of Prey seemed like a tropical vacation in comparison.
Another Fun Fact About Getting Older: When you’re old enough to be a grandmother, your peers all look at you a little sideways when they discover that you’ve seen “Wrath of Khan” at least 15 times.
Thanks to a chain of events that would be impossible to relate here, I can safely say that I owe my relationship with my husband and several of my children to “Star Trek.” Not many people would say that, let alone dare to admit it to their reading audience.
Yet Another Fun Fact About Getting Older: if I were a Vulcan I wouldn’t be old enough to be a grandmother. When your life expectancy is in the two century range, being in your mid-50s makes you an adolescent geek.
Of course, I’m a human and I’m pretty much indistinguishable from an adolescent geek, so Mission: Accomplished.
Leonard Nimoy grew to embrace the affection of the millions of inhabitants of “Star Trek Galaxy.” (Note: I’d say “Star Trek Nation,” but hey, we’re talking interstellar travel here). When he passed away he had truly lived long and prospered because of it, which is really all you can hope for when you’re Mr. Spock.
Still I’m guessing that there’s less than no chance that his family will bury him in a photon torpedo casing and commit his mortal remains to the stars, only to have them find a resting place on a mysterious planet that regenerates him so he can come back to us and say kind, comforting things that make us feel hopeful again.
But it would be … fascinating.
• Ahwatukee Foothills resident Elizabeth Evans can be reached at elizabethann40@hotmail.com.
© E. Stocking Evans 2015
Mom, Interrupted 