Nostalgia: Star Trek

My dad and I have both been getting over sicknesses. Yesterday we watched a season of Worst Cooks in America followed by several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Don’t worry, I also read over 100 pages of the book I’ve been chewing on for a week now.

Tonight I’m feeling much better, but Dad is still fighting whatever bug got the best of him. As I tried to figure out what to write about, my brother suggested writing about nostalgia. But there are so many things that send me back to happy times in my childhood, how could I write about such a broad topic?

And then the theme song for The Next Generation started and I found myself transported to warm summer nights in our old house. I watched with Dad while sitting on the floor with an ice cream sandwich. That theme song and the end credits meant it was bedtime. I can’t say that I knew what was happening in the episodes—but I loved Picard, Data, Worf, and La Forge.

I have a very distinct memory of watching the end credits while licking the melted ice cream off my fingers when my brother sunk his teeth into my left shoulder. He had a bad habit of biting people’s knees while he teethed, but my shoulder worked just as well.

It’s funny, years later he and I would watch episodes of the Original Series on VHS. One of our favorite routines was eating frozen pizzas while sitting cross-legged on his futon and watching Kirk, Spock, and McCoy explore the unknown. Dad would only let us watch a couple of the episodes. He had them stacked under his desk, and every once in a while he would give us a new tape he thought we would like.

One night he gave us The Devil in the Dark. This particular episode featured an alien that terrorized this mining crew. It killed people. And the episode ends with Spock mind melding with the creature to discover it’s a mother trying to protect its children. It’s a pretty good episode.

But the creature scared my brother. Scared him so bad that he didn’t want to go to bed that night. I remember sitting with him and telling him, “It’s okay. It’s not that scary. Just think of it as a piece of gum with cookies stuck to it.”

He sniffled a little and nodded. “That’s gross,” he said.

I laughed and agreed. It was gross, but it wasn’t scary anymore.

And here we are, adults enjoying the jokes and jabs of The Next Generation and also pondering some of the deeper questions the characters and circumstances pose.