Camp Strange

The boys in their Star Trek shirts

This is too soon to write this. I should wait a few months, maybe a year, take time and cof­fee and dreams and let it fin­ish whirling around my neural net. But Star Trek is all about the tem­po­ral anom­alies so here I sit.

One year and a cou­ple months ago, on Star Date something-or-other, my sons and I started a fam­ily tra­di­tion by acci­dent. We rented the first disk of what seemed like an end­less set of Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion DVDs. When Star Trek played in real life I was busy try­ing to make a dead-end mar­riage work and my two young sons didn’t exist. I didn’t watch tele­vi­sion then, but if I had, I wouldn’t have watched a sci-fi soap opera about humans and aliens chas­ing time.

I don’t remem­ber those early shows now. All I remem­ber is watch­ing three boys hud­dled under a navy blue cro­cheted afghan, mouths open, eyes krazy-glued to the small screen in our sun­room while reflected images of peo­ple with ridged skulls and pointed ears flick­ered on three glass cor­ner win­dows. They were hooked.

I made microwave pop­corn and poured it into an orange bucket and added extra melted but­ter, this was our rit­ual once I put the par­rot to bed, and the dog and cat would sleep on the couch between us, while my old­est son manned the remote con­trol. I never sus­pected it would become part of our life like brush­ing teeth and doing home­work. That first disk rental was a lark. But the first became the sec­ond, then the third, and a month later we were well into the first sea­son and I began to hear my two youngest sons dis­cuss the finer points of anti­mat­ter dur­ing wak­ing hours and every chipped saucer in the cup­board became an impromptu model of the Enter­prise star ship.

I can’t explain the hold it had on my sons, and then on me. I don’t remem­ber the episodes the way they do. I’m sit­ting here cry­ing while I type this, search­ing for a way to tell you how it trans­formed them into some­thing a lit­tle bit bet­ter, how they started rec­og­niz­ing the world news for the first time and ask­ing me when would our peo­ple stop fight­ing, start work­ing together as one planet — sim­ple ideas, good ideas, too sim­ple for peo­ple who crave power. One day, a bad bad day, when many sol­diers lost lives in that dis­tant sense­less war, my mid­dle son stood with bare feet on the cold tile floor of the kitchen, lis­ten­ing to NPR, and clenched his fists in frustration.

“Why don’t they stop fight­ing? We’re never going to join a Fed­er­a­tion of Plan­ets if this con­tin­ues. Don’t they know that? Why don’t they want to help end star­va­tion instead? I wish we lived in the future.”

I wished we lived in that future, too, where repli­ca­tors cre­ated gourmet meals and women wore flow­ing tunics and held impor­tant posi­tions, and no wars raged on planet Earth because star­va­tion was a mem­ory from some other sick place and time. I loved that my sons saw this, wanted a future of space travel and social justice.

I bought my sons Star Trek uni­form shirts and my youngest wore his every day. I had to wash it each night and have it on his bed every morn­ing so that he became a Star Fleet cadet in his secret mind as he sat at a small wooden desk and counted on fin­gers in school. He begged me to tell Santa to bring him an Enter­prise and a Wes­ley Crusher action fig­ure for Christ­mas, and in the weeks lead­ing up to the hol­i­day I crossed my fin­gers and bid on star ships and space men at eBay.

The week before Christ­mas brought flu to my house. Every­one but me became fever­ish and list­less. I was ter­ri­fied. The news was filled with reports of chil­dren dying of flu, and I kept vigil with cold com­presses and Tylenol and warm broth. We didn’t watch Star Trek this week, my sons could not leave bed, and I made noise with jin­gle bells in the liv­ing room and stomped my feet and ran into my sons’ room, two Star Trek action fig­ures in hand, whoop­ing and laugh­ing that Santa stopped by a few days early to drop off a pre-Christmas present because they were so so good this year. My youngest barely smiled, he was so ill, but he grabbed his Wes­ley Crusher and placed him on his chest. Two days later, on Christ­mas Eve, the ten-year-old girl next door died unex­pect­edly of flu. She played at my house every day for three years. She loved my boys and my dog and my mid­dle son hid with her in the loft above the garage, pre­tend­ing to be the Pres­i­dent. We grieved ter­ri­bly over the hol­i­day, and my youngest car­ried his new Enter­prise from room to room, still fever­ish, so lost and afraid. They can cure peo­ple instantly in Star Trek, with lit­tle metal boxes swirled above a sick body, but in this day and time only luck and grace and sparse sci­ence make deci­sions. I tried to explain this to my boys but they didn’t understand.

Some­thing about the mythol­ogy, the space, the ongo­ing conun­drums of time, kept my sons going, kept them full of hope. They started read­ing books about the solar sys­tem. They fol­lowed the NASA mis­sion to Mars and knew more about it than their teach­ers. They built star ships of blan­kets and chairs in the sun­room and spent lazy Sat­ur­day after­noons play­ing with sty­ro­foam plan­ets. All peace­ful, all sci­en­tific and humane. Chil­dren from the future.

The last sea­son of Star Trek came too fast. We watched the last episode last night. My boys have grown tall and already those Star Trek shirts are get­ting tight. They look for­ward to rent­ing Deep Space Nine episodes. I look for­ward to it, too, but my heart knows this time is over, no anom­alies can bring it back.