My dad loved Star Trek which inevitably means that I am pretty fond of it too. Appreciation through osmosis 🙂
I say loved, because sadly he isn’t around any more – he passed away 12 years ago in 2004. If there was such a thing as an eternal soul, them I’m pretty sure he would still love Star Trek, but for the rest of this I’ll stick to passed tense.
This year celebrates 50 years of Trek. 50 years!
That’s longer than I have been alive – and that’s a long time! However my dad would have been 73 this year, which means that when Trek first came out he was 23 and this is something I had never thought of before and certainly something I had never discussed with him. Was he a sci-fi fan in his youth, or did he simply convert in adulthood? This kind of though shakes my world.
There is so much that I still don’t know about my dad. So much that I wish I could still talk to him about. It’s often the case that you can know someone for so long, and so personally, without actually knowing their history – without knowing or understanding just what it was that made them who they are and the person you got to know. My dad always said he was known as the dreamer as a kid – but was he dreaming sci-fi?
As part of the Star Trek anniversary there was a twitter hashtag #50yearsofstartrek and lots of people were tweeting their favourite moments from all the various series/films and for me it was an easy choice for me: First Contact the movie – when captain Picard deliveries his ‘stand our ground’ speech aboard an Enterprise which is about to be overrun by the Borg.
Why? Because I took my dad to see it in Leicester Square the night of the London premier. Because the audience clapped and cheered as the film started, and then again when Picard gave his speech. The whole evening had an amazing atmosphere, inside and outside of the theatre, and I really think my dad loved it, as I surely did.
But let us let him tell it in his own words.
Apologies that this is only a photo of the original – I do not have any of my father’s writing in electronic format (he wrote them on a very old word processor) so all I have are paper print outs – but I am very glad to have the ones that I do.
However, if anyone can recommend a easy way to scan documents into a word format then please let me know!
#50yearsofStarTrek
#fathersson
#misshim
steveslaw 