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Jeff's Life
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Jeff Stimpson, 39, has been a working journalist for 15 years. He lives in New York with his wife Jill and sons Alex, 3, and Edwin, four months. He maintains a site of essays, Jeff's Life, at:
JEFF'S LIFE
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Monthly Column... |
Trekking
by
Jeff Stimpson
Lately my boys have made me happy as a father.
"Watch 'Star Trek'!" Ned says, right out of their evening bath. "Oh yea, watch 'Star Trek'!" The Next Generation's Enterprise looms across our TV screen and flies into a big blue thing. "It's coming ... it's coming ... it's coming," says Ned, as the ship gets bigger. "Oooooo!"
Never too early to mess with their heads. "Ned, say 'Klingon.'
"Klinan!"
"Ned, say 'Captain Picard.'"
"Camin Pee-car!"
"Picarrrrd," says Alex. He likes hard consonants. He always hit the final T hard when I asked him to finish the "Would you, could you, with a goat?" part of Green Eggs and Ham. We never have time to read that anymore.
"Watcha 'Elmo?'" says Alex.
The other night Ned was sitting on the couch beside Jill during the one where the Enterprise receives a radio signal no one can explain from a planet that is supposedly uninhabited. Actually, most of them were like that. "Dada!" Ned cried. "Dada!"
"What's that, Ned?" said Jill. "You want daddy? He's right over there, in the recliner."
"Dada!"
"Daddy's right over there, Ned."
I watched Picard and his bridge crew try to unravel their mystery, then I turned to Jill. "He's not saying 'dada,'" I told her. "He's saying, 'Mr. Data.'"
The boys seem to like "Next Generation." They haven't seen the old show yet. Ned doesn't like "Enterprise." No matter. To hear them say "Klingon" is bliss, but to hear them say "Captain Picard" very heaven. "Star Trek" is special. I remember when I was a freshman in high school and one of our local stations finally put the original show back on in syndication. Whole school went home and watched it. I was a real fan: I had many of the books, and had seen every episode several times and knew them all by name. And in which of the show's three seasons it aired. A little much, but I guess it was better than drugs.
I once had a whole fantasy life about serving in Starfleet. Not with this crew or with the Shatner bunch, but with my own crew that included a Canadian first officer, an Hispanic helmsman, a Russian doctor, and a blue alien. I was naturally the captain, I was from Boston, and my name was Thaddeus, which was my grandfather's name in my "real" life. I grew up, of course, and stopped fantasizing about this kind of thing months ago after Jill caught me in the bedroom making little explosion noises.
"Next Generation," which airs right after "Seinfeld," makes my life complete. A world with a ship, which I like, and characters who live in regimented order. Everybody on "Star Trek" does what they're supposed to when things go wrong. And all their stuff works.
Says Picard: "We may be able to use the ship's main deflector dish to emit an inverted tachyon pulse to repair the rift in the space-time continuum."
"No, no," says Ned. "Fall down!"
"Watcha 'Elmo'!" says Alex.
"And the characters notice when things go wrong," Jill adds. I sold her on the show early in our relationship, though she isn't above the occasional snippy comment. The other night, for instance, aliens had taken over the bodies of three characters, who then phasered everybody in sight. "Don't you think this is just a little silly?" Jill asked.
As a matter of fact I didn't -- she's always coming in at the middle and can't pick up the story -- but I shut the TV off anyway when Ned picked up a plastic toy pea pod and began brandishing it like a phaser, making zapping noises and then collapsing like those who'd been shot on the show.
I never used to believe that violence-on-TV-and-kids stuff, but now I'm careful to pick pacific episodes, and let the boys sit on the couch or nestle with me in the recliner. Alex often falls asleep across his stuffed Elmo, but Ned will wag his head over and over at suggestions that he go to bed after the first commercial break. Jill thinks they want to watch just because I do, but I hope the show remains special to them long after they can spell "Romulan."
She could be right, though. Ned came out of his bath last night, for instance, and said, "Oh yea. Watch 'Seinfeld!'"
Copyright 2003 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
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