Where I’ve Never Gone Before

My brother disowned me last night.  He walked into a room and gave me the Vulcan salute.  I tried to do it back but couldn’t make my fingers work that way.  Adam shook his head and said, “Seriously?  Dude.  You are not my kin.”

To say Adam loves Star Trek would be an understatement.  He knows every plot line, character, show, and movie.  When he got married five years ago, Monty and his other groomsmen wore Star Trek shirts.  So when I asked my blog readers to suggest blog post topics, I wasn’t surprised that Adam suggested Star Trek.  And I knew it wasn’t just a suggestion.  Adam was throwing down the gauntlet—challenging me to write on a subject I know very little about.

When we were kids, Adam made me watch the Star Wars movies countless times.  Then I married Monty, and he did the same.  So when I sat down to research Star Trek, I was somewhat confident—I didn’t know anything about Star Trek, but wasn’t it pretty much the same thing as Star Wars?  I Googled “Star Trek for dummies” and this was the first statement in the first article I read:  “If you have to ask whether Star Trek is like Star Wars, you are horribly, irrevocably misguided.”  Uh oh.  Then I read that between the five different Star Trek TV series and movies, there are over 700 hours of Star Trek material to watch.  700.  I’ve watched two.

If anyone else had suggested this topic, I would have stopped right there.  But a challenge from Adam isn’t something I can just ignore.  He’d never let me forget it.  Besides, I’d like him to be my kin again.  So I looked for a summary statement—one quick sentence to sum up what Star Trek is about so that I’d at least have a place to start.  There is no such sentence.  There are paragraphs and papers and posts and books and articles.  The closest statement I found to a summary was this, from “Vox:” “Star Trek is set in a utopian future in which divides based on race, gender, and nationality are a thing of the past.  It uses the lens of alien cultures to comment on contemporary issues.”  As far as I can tell, space exploration, technology, and aliens are its major themes.

So why does Adam like it so much?  I decided to find out the answer to that question.  When we were kids, he let me read to him—with conditions, of course: no girly books, no long books, and no “old-timey” books unless they were about cowboys.  He liked rhymes in books—the sing-song rhythm appealed to his musical soul.  So I thought I’d tackle the Star Trek question by writing that kind of rhyming poem.  Adam—this is for you.

“The Enterprise”

As kids we liked mysteries and following clues.
When I found a solution, you’d say, “Nice, Nancy Drew.”
My mystery tonight is why you love a show—
I guess I will solve it since you said “Make it so.”

You’ve always liked aliens, sci-fi, and space—
stories that were set in a strange, far-off place.
Star Trek has a mission which adds something more:
to boldly go where no one’s gone before.
Of course you would love it; it makes perfect sense—
you’ve always gone forward with brazen boldness.
As a kid you dreamed big of the person you’d be;
you had props, wore costumes, and acted out scenes.
You’d be an astronaut one day, a sensei the next,
a sheriff with a badge in the wild wild west.
One world wasn’t enough; you craved exploration—
to seek out new life and new civilizations.

Do you see that you did it—you got your desire?
You’ve created an enterprise, soon an empire.
You’ve made a new world with your kids and your wife—
and your next dream is happening:  peace and long life.
This is my wish for you, though I’ve been disowned:
May you live long and prosper, my best friend, my bro.